Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

In my day, never was longer.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

The revolution will be supervised.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

This blog will pay for itself.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Hail to the Hairpiece / Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Smart Takes

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Smart Takes

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************
Apart from planning for the Women’s March / Sister Marches, what’s on the agenda for the day?

*************

I applaud Josh Marshall, on “The Case for Not Being Crybabies“:

… Presidents don’t validate what is and isn’t news. If you’re expecting them to, you’re doing it wrong. Almost nothing that is truly important about the work of a free press is damaged by moving the press office across the street.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that these things are not important or that all these threats aren’t a very bad sign. It is vastly preferable to have a President who believes in or at least respects American and democratic values. But let’s get real: we don’t or won’t as of Friday. Trump is a would-be authoritarian and a bully. He’s surrounded by mediocrities who owe all to him and feel validated by enabling his endless transgressions. Of course, he’s doing these things. We know Trump’s MO. He will bully people until they’re cowed and humiliated and obedient. He’ll threaten to kick the reporters out of the White House and then either cut a ‘deal’ or make some big to-do about ‘allowing’ the reporters to stay. These are all threats and mind games meant not so much to cow the press as make them think Trump is continually taking things away from them and that they need to make him stop.

They don’t need to. That access isn’t necessary to do their jobs. And bargaining over baubles of access which are of little consequence is not compatible with doing their job. Access can provide insight and understanding. But it’s almost never where the good stuff comes from. Journalists unearth factual information and report it. If Trump wants to turn America into strong man state, journalists should cover that story rather than begging Trump not to be who he is. America isn’t Russia. And I don’t think he can change us into Russia. So unless and until we see publications shut down and journalists arrested or disappeared, let’s have a little more confidence in our values and our history and our country…

Trump wants to bully the press and profit off the presidency. He’s told us this clearly in his own words. We need to accept the reality of both. The press should cover him on that basis, as a coward and a crook. The big corporate media organizations may not be able to use those words, I understand, but they should employ that prism. The truth is that his threats against the press to date are ones it is best to laugh at. If Trump should take some un- or extra-constitutional actions, we will deal with that when it happens. I doubt he will or can. But I won’t obsess about it in advance. Journalists should be unbowed and aggressive and with a sense of humor until something happens to prevent them from doing so. Trump is a punk and a bully. People who don’t surrender up their dignity to him unhinge him…

Reader Interactions

160Comments

  2. 2.

    Stan W. Baker

    1. By 2030 you will find an Obama Hospital in every county where “General Hospital” would have been found before 1990. We will lose millions of Americans due to simple malfeasance before then.

    2. Among the things I’ve admired about the Russians, even way back in the Soviet days, is that they own their shit. We the jackasses have no such tradition.

  3. 3.

    Betty Cracker

    Morning, all. I agree that’s a great essay by Mr. Marshall, AL.

    Exile from the White House and a general loss of access would be the best thing that ever happened to our Beltway media. They’d have to learn to be reporters rather than courtiers, which might necessitate shit-canning many of the current players and hiring new folks with ambition and skill who would cover DC like foreign correspondents cover their beats.

    Any good that comes from the looming Trump era will be accidental. A realignment of the press corps would fit that bill.

  4. 4.

    amk

    nice wishful thinking from josh. has he not seen the pathetic wh press corpse or read the msm hacks in the last 8 years?

  5. 5.

    joel hanes

    Obama is too big a man to care whether or not his name goes on an airport.

    But I’d propose a deal to the Rs: we won’t put Obama’s name on HNL, and in return, DCA goes back to being “National” (which, I believe, many veteran pilots and air traffic people still call it).

  6. 6.

    Eljai

    Oh please, please let this be a big wake-up call for the press. So far they’re disappointing me.

  7. 7.

    NotMax

    Makes a helluva lot more sense to rename or co-name Dulles than to change the name of Honolulu’s airport.

    Howzabout having the presidential plane hangared at the Obama-Andrews air base?

    How long before the Pumpkin Peril rechristens the executive retreat as Camp Ivanka?

    BTW, by the end of 2016 Obama had been to Camp David 39 times, covering all or part of 93 days, compared to Dubya who over 8 years went 149 times, covering 487 days.

  8. 8.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @NotMax:

    Obama had been to Camp David 39 times, covering all or part of 93 days

    Just about the amount of time I expect Trump to spend in the White House.

  9. 9.

    gene108

    Meh…I have no sympathy for the MSM…none…even if Trump goes full Putin on the MSM, I still have no sympathy

    They were faced with a simple choice: Assume people, who have been in the public eye for 25 years nationally and close to 40 years in Arkansas, who have had tens of millions of dollars spent investigating them for every type of imagined wrong doing, with nothing found other than one person cheated on his wife, are (1) evil super villains, who just have not been caught red-handed because not every stone has not been overturned and more investigations are warranted or (2) they are basically honest people, with regards to discharging their duties as public servants, and more investigations are politically motivated by their adversaries.

    The media made Choice 1, which is a large part of the reason we have Trump.

    They knowingly brought this on themselves.

    Fuck ’em.

  10. 10.

    Juice Box

    Hawai’i or Honolulu can name its airport anything that they want. Congress has no say in the matter outside of DC. Little Rock named its airport “Bill and Hillary Clinton International” in 2012 which is the only airport in the world named for a woman.

    All the airports in the world and we get 1/2 of one single one.

  12. 12.

    amk

    @gene108: yup, fuck’em all. new bright and young journos are needed to replace the entire current corrupt and mostly white lot.

    @Juice Box: Delhi airport is named Indira Gandhi. Amman airport is Queen Alia. But your point remains.

  15. 15.

    amk

    By this time in 2008, the big names from the haute couture world were queuing up outside the White House for the privilege of showcasing their creations on the most charismatic and stylish of First Ladies, wife of America’s first black President.

    Here’s a little noticed curiosity (among the many oddities) of the current presidential transition process.

    The incoming First Lady is a former model who has retained all the glamour of the ramp.

    But on the subject of who’s offering their sartorial services to the wife of a billionaire who will represent the United States for at least the next four years there is radio silence.

  19. 19.

    Kay

    Sen. Al Franken asked DeVos to explain her thinking on whether test scores should be used to measure students’ proficiency or their growth. That’s an important, and basic, difference because it affects how schools are labeled as succeeding or failing.
    But DeVos had no idea what Franken was talking about.
    “I think if I am understanding your question correctly around proficiency, I would correlate it to competency and mastery, so each student according to the advancements they are making in each subject area,” she said to Franken.
    “That’s growth,” Franken retorted, correctly. “That’s not proficiency.” By the time DeVos understood Franken’s question, she had no time left to answer.
    This wasn’t just a matter of mixing up some jargon. DeVos’s response, as well as her reactions to similar questions about the basics of federal education policy, suggested she knows little about what the department she hopes to lead actually does.

    And when DeVos was asked about those issues, she often floundered. She didn’t seem to understand how the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the bedrock federal law guaranteeing an education to students with disabilities, works — and later admitting to Sen. Maggie Hassan that she might have been confused. She was way off on a figure about how much student debt has grown. She gave a non-answer to Sen. Bob Casey’s question about the Education Department’s instructions to colleges on handling sexual assault, suggesting she knew the guidance was controversial but didn’t understand what it was.
    Few education secretaries are conversant with everything the department does on their first day, or even much later. In his seven years as secretary, Duncan stuck firmly to talking points on higher education policy while speaking much more fluently on K-12, where he had much more experience.
    Even by those standards, though, DeVos’s Wednesday performance was notable. It suggests that Democrats’ best line of attack might not have been her family’s wealth and political donations or her failure to finalize an ethics agreement before her hearing. It was softball questions she should have been able to answer, not harsh attacks, that tripped her up every time.

    The DeVos hearing went very badly. She doesn’t know anything. But she’s a political operative, so when Democrats went after her on ethics or donations, she easily parried that because she’s been doing that for 30 years.

    Where she fell apart was with simple, polite questions about basic federal education law and policy.

    Hassen was actually very generous. She set up the question by relating that she has a son who is disabled, which to anyone who had any idea what was going on would be time to prepare- “I”m about to be asked a question about students with disabilities so thank God for this long lead-up!” but even then DeVos was baffled. DeVos NEVER got it- she had no idea was Hassen was talking about.

    An ambitious journalist could do the same to Donald Trump. He’d fall apart too if he were asked basic questions about the President’s job or federal law or policy. The key to exposing them as over-promoted incompetents is not asking them lots and lots of difficult questions- it’s asking them one or two easy questions.

  20. 20.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    Pffff.

    Naming an international airport after Obama — BIG DEAL

    Hell, Trump had an entire university named after him.

    Top that, Nobama!

  22. 22.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    President Obama has now commuted the sentences of 1,385 individuals – the most grants of commutation issued by any President in this nation’s history. President Obama’s 1,385 commutation grants – which includes 504 life sentences – is also more than the total number of commutations issued by the past 12 presidents combined.

    Commutations by President:

    Obama………..1385
    Bush Jr…………….11
    Clinton…………….61
    Bush Sr…………….3
    Reagan…………..13
    Carter……………..29
    Ford………………..22
    Nixon………………60
    LBJ………………..226
    JFK………………..100
    Ike…………………..47
    Truman…………118
    Roosevelt……..488

  23. 23.

    Mustang Bobby

    @Kay: I wouldn’t be surprised if the Trump administration wants to dismantle federal-through-state education entitlement programs such as IDEA, Title I, Title II, Title III, Carl Perkins and so on and tell the local districts to find their own way to pay for them.

  24. 24.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: I love it! It’s such an elegant and simple solution: treat cabinet hearings like a job interview that probes for basic qualifications for that position, and these plutocratic political hacks will fall flat on their fucking faces! Genius! :)

  25. 25.

    Kay

    In contrast, former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, said in his introduction of DeVos that her experience outside the educational establishment was an asset — not a liability — because the nation needed a disruptor to fix its ailing schools.
    “I believe today that’s one of the important qualifications you can have for this job,” Lieberman said, adding that schools need a “change agent.”

    And Joe Lieberman is still spouting banal slogans in place of actually thinking or saying anything. He’s a mediocrity too. Over-promoted for 40 years.

    I have to say, it’s an interesting theory, that people in the education department should dismiss the value of both education and experience. Under this theory, no one has to learn anything before doing any job and no one who has a job learns anything from experience. It’s actively anti-educational. If you just need to be a change agent to be successful we could hire an 8th grader. They’re change agents and they don’t know a whole lot. They’re also way more open minded than Betsy DeVos, who has been stewing in the far Right fever swamp for 30 years.

  26. 26.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    Future:

    The Obama Center for the Performing Arts

    The aircraft carrier USS Obama

    Obama Stadium

    Rue de Barack Obama

    $100 dollar bill

    Obama Intergalactic Moon Base

    Obama School of Medicine at Northwestern

  28. 28.

    bjacques

    I suppose Congress could pass a bill extending federal regulation over airports to how they are named, subject to Congressional approval? I wouldn’t put it past them.

    I’ll just mark the inauguration by hanging an upside down flag on my FB post. It’s not a lot, I know.

    Then back to the Winchester for a pint and wait ’til this all blows over!

  29. 29.

    Mustang Bobby

    @Kay:

    If you just need to be a change agent to be successful we could hire an 8th grader. They’re change agents and they don’t know a whole lot. They’re also way more open minded than Betsy DeVos, who has been stewing in the far Right fever swamp for 30 years.

    And they would know a hell of a lot more about what’s going on in the public schools than she would.

  30. 30.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    The key is not worrying about lowering the bar, which is what I was doing. The key is setting the bar really low and then watching them trip over it. Franken doesn’t have to go from a basic question to a more difficult one. If she flops on one basic question there’s no need for more time- he can wrap it up in 5 minutes- and 5 minutes is all Republicans gave them, because they know she’s completely unqualified.

    There were “gasps” in the room when she said disabled children in public schools were a state issue because that’s the opposite of true. It’s 40% federal funding compared to 9% federal for non-disabled students. It’s essential. Ohio funds public schools at about 7k per kid. A disabled student can easily cost 25k a year. They can’t go to public schools without federal funding, which was the point of the law. It was this huge civil rights battle in the 1970’s. Giant. Ground breaking. She has no idea any of this occurred.

  31. 31.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay:

    If you just need to be a change agent to be successful we could hire an 8th grader.

    We did. He gets sworn in on Friday. Unfortunately, we hired a 2 yr old to be Pence’s boss.

  35. 35.

    Phylllis

    @Mustang Bobby: No, it’ll be like they did with the old Title IV-Safe & Drug Free Schools & Title V-Innovative funds. The ‘titles’ will remain because they’re in settled law, they’ll just starve them of funding to pay for choice and vouchers.

  36. 36.

    Kay

    @rikyrah:

    i felt like the smirking was inappropriate. She may just not be very bright. If Senator Murphy asks a question about guns in school she doesn’t know this is heading straight to Newtown and smiling is bizarre?

    It’s like “my son is disabled so let me tell you this long-ish story to give you time to prepare for my question on students with disabilities”. No amount of civility and kindness was enough to hoist her over the bar there. We’re 3 minutes into the lead-in and she’s not tracking yet.

  37. 37.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    There were “gasps” in the room when she said disabled children in public schools were a state issue because that’s the opposite of true

    She would have really impressed her boss if she had mocked them at the hearing. Missed opportunity.

  38. 38.

    Mustang Bobby

    @Kay: I also don’t think she grasps how complex the program is. In my district (Miami-Dade), we have over 1,300 full-time employees paid out of the program, not to mention the hourly and support staff just to make sure we meet the requirements.

  39. 39.

    Phylllis

    @Kay: Not only public school students. Public schools must conduct Child Find and provide equitable special education services to private school students who need them.

  40. 40.

    p.a.

    Oops if my comment at 33 is still there (have req deletion) don’t do the link; it doesn’t go where intended.

  42. 42.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: Were American elites always this fucking lame? Seems like, within living memory, at least some of them had a sense of noblesse oblige, e.g., Poppy Bush joining the Navy after Pearl Harbor. Now it’s all grift, all the time. No wonder there’s a whiff of “Fall of Rome” in the air.

  43. 43.

    Kay

    @Phylllis:

    Thank you. I know you know way more about this than I do. I just have the bare outlines because I’m on a school committee and I sometimes appear before school boards when I’m retained by parents for various appeals on discipline- suspensions or expulsions. I interview people in schools a lot too for some of the court-appointed work I do. I’m often impressed by what fierce advocates people who work with disabled children are. They’re noisy – which is good :)

  47. 47.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    Not to get too far into the weeds of Holland Michigan, but “rich Michigan Dutch” is its own culture. That’s her world. She never would have been challenged had she remained a big fish in her small pond because it would be career suicide to get on her bad side. They’re a kind of local royalty – there’s a lot of strutting around and bragging about frugality and hard work and judgmental harsh Calvinism, but that’s 2 or 3 or 4 generations back. The heirs aren’t all that impressive. DeVos just got the standard bachelors degree and set about buying Michigan lawmakers. Whatever their forebears were or were not the current crop are average.

  48. 48.

    AxelFoley

    @gene108:

    Meh…I have no sympathy for the MSM…none…even if Trump goes full Putin on the MSM, I still have no sympathy

    They were faced with a simple choice: Assume people, who have been in the public eye for 25 years nationally and close to 40 years in Arkansas, who have had tens of millions of dollars spent investigating them for every type of imagined wrong doing, with nothing found other than one person cheated on his wife, are (1) evil super villains, who just have not been caught red-handed because not every stone has not been overturned and more investigations are warranted or (2) they are basically honest people, with regards to discharging their duties as public servants, and more investigations are politically motivated by their adversaries.

    The media made Choice 1, which is a large part of the reason we have Trump.

    They knowingly brought this on themselves.

    Fuck ’em.

    This. All this.

    Not one ounce of sympathy for them. They brought this on themselves and the rest of us.

    Fuck ’em to hell.

  50. 50.

    satby

    Aaargh! Morning everyone (not good).

    So in my capacity as the token former IT person in the Dr.’s office, on Monday evening I performed the recommended BIOS update on the laptop that is used as a second pc: HP Pavilion. Seemed to go perfectly smoithly the night before. Windows uodates are set to run automatically. Yesterday, it randomly restarted multiple times, different error messages every time. Had HP support remote in, after about 20 minutes and analysis of the dump files he said it was a Windows issue (looks like a driver conflict). I brought it home last night to do a recovery to an image from last week, which also seems to have gone fine, but after running an hour with all work apps open, it just restarted again. Ironically, the main advice I can find is updating the BIOS. Already also did a hard reset. Any of you gurus have any other ideas?

  54. 54.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @satby:

    Seemed to go perfectly smoithly the night before.

    Channeling your inner Curly again, I see. Might be the problem. ;-)

  56. 56.

    satby

    @Baud: She wants to pay me, no worries. She also knows we had to update it; my coworkers and the office manager on the other hand are bitterly angry with me because it’s ALL MY FAULT, THINGS WERE JUST FINE!!

  58. 58.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    This is very populist, but would I like to see in an education secretary is someone who retrained. DeVos likes to talk about how the working classes need to buckle down and take some community college classes after work so they can apply at Google or whatever, but that’s actually really hard. We’re talking about 50 or 60 hour weeks while working and raising children. The people in community colleges at night are really impressive individuals. They have 2 and 3 jobs. They’re like the most ambitious and focused 20% because it’s hard.

    DeVos has more money than God and she never went back to school. Is she just better than them? They have to retrain but she can just wing it? I mean, she doesn’t really “value” education or training, right? If she did she would have pursued some before getting this job.

  59. 59.

    satby

    @OzarkHillbilly: yep. Punchy, I stayed up late, then got up early. It worked after the recovery, but then the last Windows update (combined security/malware updates) ran again when I shut it down for the night and now it seems I’m back to restarts.

    They avoid shutting it down for weeks on end just to prevent updates. So my life isnt worth a plugged nickel if this doesn’t get fixed ?

  62. 62.

    amk

    @Betty Cracker: The rw nutsos, while spouting the throw out all out of touch elite bums, have replaced them with even more elite and even more out of touch swindlers & conmen to rule over their fate.

  63. 63.

    ThresherK (tablet)

    @Kay: Who.let that fcker into the Capitol? I mean, I’m glad.he’s not here in my state, but given the choice I could put up.with him spouting his crap solely on the local news.

  65. 65.

    amk

    @satby: I had the same issues with the win 10 ‘anniversary’ update. On restart (with constant nagging from the OS), the stupid system won’t reboot and would go in circles (literally). Then by accident, I found out that if I remove the wireless mouse receiver from the laptop, the reboot was successful. Since then, I always remove the mouse receiver before I reboot after an update.

    mandatory fu m$.

  66. 66.

    MomSense

    Another massive round of DHS funding cuts here in Maine that provide support services to adults and children with disabilities. Lets just say that I was especially mad about listening to Devos testify.

    More layoffs and suffering coming for people who work with some of our most vulnerable and for people with disabilities in our state.

    Gotta pay for more tax cuts somehow.

    Evil is an epidemic.

  67. 67.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @GxB: No, the kind you need when it rains. The rain is supposed to start tonight and not end until Monday. There may be brief respite on Saturday in honor of the anniversary of my birth.

  68. 68.

    Kay

    I hope someone posts a clip of Obama and Michelle getting on the helicopter because I have to carefully cull Trump horribleness while also viewing that. There are sacrifices I won’t make and watching hours of the Trump Family marching around and bellowing and bragging while the motorcycle gangs threaten protesters are one of them.

  70. 70.

    bystander

    Remember when Obama invented awarding ambassadorial positions to people who were instrumental in getting him elected? The first POTUS to appoint people who were politically aligned with him? I wonder why none of our fine journalists hasn’t noted that Trump seems to be doing that with cabinet positions. I’m really puzzled.

  71. 71.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @satby: Try making sure your device drivers are all up to date. I had a BIOS update from HP that went terribly wrong, as in the computer wouldn’t turn on.

    P.S. – OT: I’ve learned that Lightroom/Photoshop works much better if you use specific camera profiles as opposed to the Adobe Standard Profile. My pictures now have that “zing” they were missing. Neither Samsung nor Adobe provide any custom profiles, I found a guy who sells them via a Google search. Best $15 I’ve ever spent.

  73. 73.

    montanareddog

    @amk: And Queen Alia International Airport is, AFAIK, the only airport named after someone who died in an air accident (helicopter crash)

  76. 76.

    Phylllis

    @Mustang Bobby: My Title I school principal, who was the Title I school liaison at her previous school in another district, was shocked to discover we had to send letters to the private schools to invite their participation. I keep hoping one or two will accept, because it surely would upset the financial apple cart in our district. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing.

  77. 77.

    Kay

    @MomSense:

    Kasich announced he has a billion dollar budget hole. “Cut taxes and increase revenue because the tax cuts will spur larger tax payments at lower rates” failed. For the hundreth time. Like it does every single time and has since Reagan.

    It’s a modified Kansas situation. He’s bewildered why he doesn’t have any money after he collected much less. I myself received the princely sum of 200 dollars in reduced state taxes, but then I raised my own property taxes by 600 to make up for the public school cuts. Using ordinary math rather than Reagan mathism I believe I am down 400 dollars.

  78. 78.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @satby:

    They avoid shutting it down for weeks on end just to prevent updates.

    Graduates of the OzarkHillbilly School of Information Technology, eh?

  82. 82.

    Gindy51

    @satby: Turn off the auto updates. Follow Ask Woody’s advice (google the website.) I haven’t had mine set to auto update for over 5 years.

  85. 85.

    p.a.

    @OzarkHillbilly: I’m mostly mac now, but I grew to like win platforms once I started blocking all updates. In 4-5 years I picked up 1 virus, but it caused much less damage than their incessant updates and patches did.

  88. 88.

    satby

    @BillinGlendaleCA: it reran last night after I ran the recovery. I can disable auto-update, and run the recovery again. They let their antivirus lapse so Win Defender is the only antivirus, I ran Malwarebytes and it scanned clean.
    Other than that, I may just tell them to calk Geek Squad, and decline any more IT support.
    Edit: just deleted the wireless mouse driver. Waiting to see if that fixes it.

  90. 90.

    matryoshka

    @Kay: Yes, it is anti-educational. It is the outer expression of the disdain these people have for learning, for the intellect, and for expertise. They think democracy and liberal institutions are stupid and soft, so of course it takes a person with little more than a pulse to run one.

  92. 92.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @p.a.: Every time this computer goes into auto-update I start screaming at it and my wife hides all my hammers. The latest mess may have convinced my wife to go Mac as well. (took her weeks to straighten out)

  94. 94.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The worthless offal that is the Village will never surrender their precious “access” because these people are not journalists, they’re infotainers, and as we’ll see over the next few months, abject cowards and vile lickspittles.

    They’ll all collaborate like mad. This needs to be remembered.

  96. 96.

    Jeffro

    @joel hanes:

    I’d propose a deal to the Rs: we won’t put Obama’s name on HNL, and in return, DCA goes back to being “National” (which, I believe, many veteran pilots and air traffic people still call it).

    Veteran pilots, air traffic people, and me & Mrs. Jeffro ;)

  97. 97.

    Jeffro

    Btw can I just say I’m glad I didn’t see Adam’s gator video until this morning?? I wouldn’t have slept a wink and might never have gone outside ever again.

    Holy cow, what are those people thinking, standing that close to that thing?

  98. 98.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Kay: DeVos and her entire parasite family need to be put up against the wall and their ill-gotten through fraud fortune confiscated. For starters.

  99. 99.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Joe Biden brought laughs, gaffes and authenticity to White House

    They left out my favorite Joe Biden moment from the last 8 years: “I had an interpreter, and when he was showing me his office I said, ‘It’s amazing what capitalism will do, won’t it? A magnificent office!’ And he laughed. As I turned, I was this close to him,” Biden said, signaling that the two leaders were standing just inches apart. “I said,‘Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.’ “And he looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, ‘We understand one another.’” Biden said. “This is who this guy is!”

  101. 101.

    Patricia Kayden

    @joel hanes: I call the international airport in Washington, D.C. (actually located in Northern Virginia) “National Airport” and not that other name.

    @Villago Delenda Est: Not even sure that Trump cares about the press as a whole collaborating with him since he has his own favored media outlets (Fox News, Breitbart, InfoWars, WSJ) to push his story. He can shut out the rest of them.

  102. 102.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    he’s doing these things. We know Trump’s MO. He will bully people until they’re cowed and humiliated and obedient. He’ll threaten to kick the reporters out of the White House and then either cut a ‘deal’ or make some big to-do about ‘allowing’ the reporters to stay. These are all threats and mind games meant not so much to cow the press as make them think Trump is continually taking things away from them and that they need to make him stop.

    A narcissists in other words. And when the press refuses to be controlled Trump will ignore them because a narcissists doesn’t know how to deal with equals.

    That does raise a good question on Trump’s Iceland summit thought.

  104. 104.

    MomSense

    @Kay:

    The Republicans keep shifting the tax burden down to the point where municipalities are trying to make up the difference for the whole system. Even with ridiculous property tax increases every year we are also cutting our school budgets.

    Cutting support systems is already affecting emergency rooms because the adults with disabilities who previously had support staff or lived with families had people who could take them to the doctor or make sure they were eating, cleaning out their refrigerators, etc. Now they are alone and don’t know how to fully care for themselves so they are going to emergency rooms needing basic help.

    This is not a cost effective way to manage the health and well being of a vulnerable population. We are doing this to cut taxes (mostly for the wealthy because freedumb) and so the anus mouthed governor can brag about cutting taxes and cutting those evil state employees. It’s a mess.

    Their economic ideology is as bankrupt as it is evil.

  105. 105.

    Another Scott

    @satby: I needed an old PC at work to run an old interface card, but the PC needed to run Win7 or later. I dug one out of “storage”, upgraded it from Win2000 to XP (to be able to run the Win7 installer), upgraded to Win7, it was running fine, then ran all the Windows Updates. Rebooted…

    And it hung in the BIOS screen.

    Tried to update the BIOS, but the BIOS updater wouldn’t run because it would get stuck in the BIOS screen on rebooting.

    Spent a week or two, off and on, trying to get it unscrambled. (Interestingly, I could get in the BIOS by pulling the battery, and then adjust the settings, but the settings would be lost on reboot, and putting a new battery in would cause it to get stuck again.)

    (I found some replacement BIOS chips for it on eBay but haven’t tried installing them.)

    I ended up punting and finding another PC and doing the upgrade-o-rama again.

    Apparently Windows can do nasty things if it tickles a BIOS or driver bug. In my case, the bad PC had a Via chipset, and those were rather notorious for having issues back in the day.

    Laptops are a different beast (dunno if the BIOS is socketed or not – I would doubt it).

    Don’t know what to suggest, but I wish you luck. I hope your backup is good!

    I hate Winders… :-(

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  106. 106.

    Another Scott

    @satby: Also, is the battery OK? We had an old Dell laptop that acted very strangely, even when plugged in, when the batteries were nearly dead. Once we let the batteries charge up a few hours, it was fine.

    One more thing – if you can get it open, see if you can replace the BIOS battery. I assume it’s the usual 2032 button battery. PCs can act very strangely if the battery is dead or dying.

    Good luck!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  107. 107.

    Elmo

    @BillinGlendaleCA: My friend in Mammoth made the mistake of being down south during the last AR, and when he got home there was 10 feet of snow in his driveway because his plow guy hadn’t bothered. He had to spend the next few nights in a hotel in town.

    (And yes, 10 feet is no exaggeration. He lives at the top of a hill and his driveway is on the lee side)

  108. 108.

    satby

    Well, I guess the ok news is it’s restarting about once an hour instead of once every 20 minutes. I have to bring it back, so they can all just hate on me and call the Geek Squad, and I won’t help them anymore. I understand their frustration, they don’t understand mine at their unreasonable expectations and refusal to maintain the thing properly. So we’re even I guess.
    This shit is why I chose living in poverty vs trying to find another job in IT, though I haven’t been a break fix person in forever.

  111. 111.

    Yoda Dog Democrat

    @Jeffro: Way, way, waaaay too close for my comfort. No fucking chance I’m getting within 100 yards of that dinosaur.

  113. 113.

    rikyrah

    New Trump Adviser Being Sued for Hiring White Men to Attack African Americans
    Reed Cordish allegedly called African Americans ‘urbans’ and hired thugs to scare them away from his restaurants and clubs. Now he’s got a job in the White House.
    KELLY WEILL
    M.L. NESTEL
    01.17.17 9:40 PM ET

    President-elect Donald Trump’s newest White House adviser runs a real-estate company currently being sued by African-Americans who accuse it of racial discrimination and hiring white men to physically attack and eject them.

    On Wednesday, Trump tapped Reed Cordish as assistant to the president for Intergovernmental and Technology Initiatives. Cordish is an executive of the Cordish Companies, his family’s Baltimore, Maryland-based real-estate business, and the president of Entertainment Concepts Investors, a subsidiary that owns and manages bars, restaurants, and clubs throughout the country.

    ECI’s largest holdings are in Kansas City, Missouri, where Cordish partnered with Trump’s son-in-law and White House advisor Jared Kushner on a building in the city’s “Power and Light District.”

  115. 115.

    rikyrah

    Uh huh
    Uh huh

    NOTORIOUS MERCENARY ERIK PRINCE IS ADVISING TRUMP FROM THE SHADOWS
    Jeremy Scahill
    January 17 2017, 2:42 p.m.

    Erik Prince, America’s most notorious mercenary, is lurking in the shadows of the incoming Trump administration. A former senior U.S. official who has advised the Trump transition told The Intercept that Prince has been advising the team on matters related to intelligence and defense, including weighing in on candidates for the defense and state departments. The official asked not to be identified because of a transition policy prohibiting discussion of confidential deliberations.

    On election night, Prince’s latest wife, Stacy DeLuke, posted pictures from inside Trump’s campaign headquarters as Donald Trump and Mike Pence watched the returns come in, including a close shot of Pence and Trump with their families. “We know some people who worked closely with [Trump] on his campaign,” DeLuke wrote. “Waiting for the numbers to come in last night. It was well worth the wait!!!! #PresidentTrump2016.” Prince’s sister, billionaire Betsy DeVos, is Trump’s nominee for education secretary and Prince (and his mother) gave large sums of money to a Trump Super PAC.

    In July, Prince told Trump’s senior advisor and white supremacist Steve Bannon, at the time head of Breitbart News, that the Trump administration should recreate a version of the Phoenix Program, the CIA assassination ring that operated during the Vietnam War, to fight ISIS. Such a program, Prince said, could kill or capture “the funders of Islamic terror and that would even be the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East, and any of the other illicit activities they’re in.”

    Prince also said that Trump would be the best force to confront “Islamic fascism.” “As for the world looking to the United States for leadership, unfortunately, I think they’re going to have to wait till January and hope Mr. Trump is elected because, clearly, our generals don’t have a stomach for a fight,” Prince said. “Our President doesn’t have a stomach for a fight and the terrorists, the fascists, are winning.”

  116. 116.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @bystander:

    I wonder why none of our fine journalists hasn’t noted that Trump seems to be doing that with cabinet positions. I’m really puzzled.

    Likely because it’s so self destructive of Trump to do it. Unlike Ambassadors, Cabinet Secretaries aren’t ceremonial.

  117. 117.

    rikyrah

    Trump Off to Historically Bad Start
    by Martin Longman
    January 17, 2017 1:46 PM

    Dana Milbank collected a (still incomplete) list of all the people Trump has insulted and gloated over since we won his surprising election in early November. As I read it, I kept having the same experience: “Oh yeah, I forgot about that one.” It’s more evidence that the specifics of the insults don’t matter. What’s important is that he’s always on offense. He’s always giving his audience more.

    It’s true that this demonstrates continuity with this approach to the campaign, but it also makes him a sore winner. And very few people like sore winners. Milbank probably puts too much emphasis on this one point as he uses it to explain Trump’s astonishingly bad poll numbers, but it’s a factor.

    Looking back, it will also be hard to judge the way the Bush presidency handled winning the presidency despite losing the popular vote because the 9/11 attacks reshaped everything. But he was struggling by Labor Day of 2001. In late may, Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont was already so incensed by the way Bush was handling the presidency that he defected from the Republican Party and handed control of the Senate over to the Democrats. By late-August, a rift had opened up between Colin Powell at the State Department and the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis. The overall perception was that Bush was acting as if he’d won some giant mandate that simply didn’t exist, and that he wasn’t doing enough to reach out to those who had opposed his presidency. It was beginning to cost him.

    ………………………………

    From WaPo:

    Compared with other presidents, Trump’s handling of the transition has been judged harshly by respondents. As with his favorable rating, 40 percent say they approve and 54 percent disapprove. In comparison, roughly 8 in 10 approved of the way Obama and former presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush handled their transitions. And about 7 in 10 approved of the way former president George W. Bush handled his, even though it came amid the rancorous 37-day recount of ballots in Florida and a controversial Supreme Court decision that helped put him in the Oval Office…

    …So far, Trump has generated little confidence about his ability to make sound decisions as president. When asked generally about their faith in his decision-making, just under 4 in 10 say they have either a “great deal” or a “good amount” of confidence in him, and about 6 in 10 say they have “just some” or “none at all.” That is the mirror opposite of attitudes eight years ago on the eve of Obama’s first inauguration.

  119. 119.

    rikyrah

    Trump gets no respect. That’s because he hasn’t earned it.
    By Dana Milbank
    Opinion writer January 16

    Kellyanne Conway is walking a Dangerfield line.

    “We got no forbearance. We got nothing. We got no respect,” the Trump strategist told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last week, complaining about media coverage of her boss. “This man is president of the United States!”

    Conway raises a fair question: Why hasn’t the president-elect been given more respect?

    Here’s a fair answer: He hasn’t earned any.

    To Trump’s many self-assigned superlatives, he can now add another: the sorest winner. With charity for none and with malice toward all but his supporters, he has in the past two months set a new standard for gracelessness in victory.

    Instead of brushing off criticism, as a president-elect can afford to do, Trump in recent days marked Martin Luther King weekend by telling off civil rights icon John Lewis (a King acolyte) and his “falling apart” and “crime infested” congressional district. He bemoaned “Saturday Night Live” spoofs as a “hit job” and used the words “crap” and “sleazebag” in his public statements. He called the top Democrat in the land the “head clown” and accused the American intelligence community of acting like Nazis.

    ………………..

    The losers often have hard feelings after elections. But this much enmity from the winner is extraordinary. Trump, after his election-night promise to “bind the wounds of division” and be a “president for all Americans,” never attempted reconciliation. A day later, he falsely condemned “professional protesters, incited by the media,” and at year end he taunted opponents via Twitter: “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!”

    This explains Trump’s short honeymoon. His favorability rating jumped from 34 percent during the campaign to 44 percent in late November in a Quinnipiac University poll as Americans gave their new leader the benefit of the doubt. But that same poll showed his favorability back down to 37 percent. Views about his honesty, leadership and ability to unite the country dropped similarly

  120. 120.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @rikyrah:

    In July, Prince told Trump’s senior advisor and white supremacist Steve Bannon, at the time head of Breitbart News, that the Trump administration should recreate a version of the Phoenix Program, the CIA assassination ring that operated during the Vietnam War, to fight ISIS. Such a program, Prince said, could kill or capture “the funders of Islamic terror and that would even be the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East, and any of the other illicit activities they’re in.”

    So Prince is taking the next logical step and go for murder for higher.

  125. 125.

    rikyrah

    THANK YOU!!!

    Archie Bunker has gotten a bad rep this election.

    Archie Bunker actually voted for HILLARY.

    it was Archie’s boss and his White wife that voted for Cheeto Benito.

    But, that boss is more than willing to push Archie out in front as the face of this election, making him the scapegoat.

    ……………………………………

    Trump and the Revolt of the White Middle Class
    No, the white working class didn’t propel Trump to the presidency.

    by Stephen Rose January 18, 2017

    …………………………….

    Exit poll data bears out the thesis that Trump’s “base” is the white middle class:

    Trump voters are better off than Clinton voters.

    First, note that voters as a group are better off than the entire adult population. While only 33 percent of adults had a four-year college degree, fully 50 percent of the electorate was college-educated. The median income for all voters was $66,000 (my calculation from CNN exit poll numbers), while Trump voters were slightly wealthier than Clinton voters (the median income of Trump voters was $69,000 versus $63,000 for Clinton supporters).

    Just 1 in 6 Trump voters was a non-college-educated white earning less than $50,000.

    Breaking down the Trump vote by income reveals that Trump got 31 percent of his votes from people in households with incomes under $50,000 (which I have called elsewhere the “poor,” “near poor,” and “lower middle class”), 34 percent from those with incomes between $50,000 to 100,000 (my definition of “middle class”), and 35 percent from those with incomes above $100,000 (my definition of “upper middle class” and “rich”).

    Some might think that most of the 31 percent who voted for Trump with incomes under $50,000 came from whites who lost their manufacturing jobs and had trouble finding comparable employment. But they would be wrong. Clinton bested Trump among voters in households with incomes below $50,000 by 12 percentage points

  127. 127.

    rikyrah

    Quick Takes: You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s (Almost) Gone
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    January 17, 2017 5:30 PM

    * Robert Pear reports:

    President-elect Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans appear to have accomplished a feat that President Obama, with all the power at his disposal, could not in the past seven years: They have galvanized outspoken support for the Affordable Care Act.

    People who benefit from the law are flooding Congress with testimonials. Angry consumers are confronting Republican lawmakers. And Democrats who saw the law as a political liability in recent elections have suddenly found their voice, proudly defending the law now that it is in trouble.

    Thousands of people across the country held rallies over the weekend to save the health care law, which Republicans moved last week to repeal with a first but crucial legislative step. A widely circulated video showed Representative Mike Coffman, Republican of Colorado, eluding constituents who had wanted to meet with him to express their concerns on Saturday at a community event in Aurora, Colo. Rallies on Sunday to save the health law drew robust crowds around the country.

  128. 128.

    rikyrah

    an updated CBO report on what happens if Republicans repeal Obamacare.

    CBO estimates that, compared to what’s already projected to happen under current law:

    * 18 million more people would become uninsured in the first full year after the bill’s enactment — rising to 32 million more people by 2026;
    * premiums in the individual insurance marketplaces would soar — they’d go up 20 to 25 percent above currently projected increases in the first full year after repeal, and “would about double by 2026”;
    * and access to coverage on the individual markets would plummet — about half of the US population would live in areas “that would have no insurer participating” in the individual market, CBO projects.

  129. 129.

    Patricia Kayden

    @rikyrah: It just can’t get any worse with this guy. Yet Steve Harvey and MLK III had no problems meeting with Trump. How many ways can he tell you that he’s a racist before you get it?

  130. 130.

    MomSense

    @rikyrah:

    Thank you Stephen Rose. I feel like I’ve been taking crazy pills. It seems to me that pretending trump support was economic anxiety was the media’s way of trying to pretend it wasn’t racism and that they aren’t complicit.

  132. 132.

    Aleta

    @MomSense: >pretending trump support was economic anxiety was the media’s way of trying to pretend it wasn’t racism<
    And to avoid exposure of the business interests and corruption of his wealthy or well-placed supporters.
    Giulianni is just one of the more obvious examples.

  134. 134.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Kay:

    I’m often impressed by what fierce advocates people who work with disabled children are.

    Ms. O now works in a disability-related field. Parents of children with disabilities are also fierce advocates, which is why we have the ADA and similar provisions. Ms. DeVos won’t know what hit her if she starts messing with the disability community.

  135. 135.

    Aleta

    Racism used as part of the machinery for maximizing profits has never ended. And MS media never acknowledges it except (only very recently, and only pbs-like) when talking about much much earlier history of slavery.

  136. 136.

    rikyrah

    The Republicans Are Stuck on Health Care Reform
    by Martin Longman
    January 17, 2017 4:48 PM

    I think it’s reasonable to talk about what would have happen if Congress repeals the Affordable Care Act without replacing it because there is no assurance that anything will replace it. The Republicans can try to reassure people that all these horrible things won’t happen, but there’s no reason to believe they’ll be able to make good on that promise.

    For one thing, the reason that horrible things will happen is because they want to get rid of most of the things that make the health care scheme work. In order to make it possible to be profitable while insuring people with pre-existing conditions, you need lots and lots of healthy people paying premiums who don’t actually use much health care. That’s why there is an individual mandate. The subsidies in the individual market and the Medicaid spending are what makes it affordable for millions of people to get coverage, so if you eliminate or drastically reduce those subsidies, tens of millions will lose their health care access. The Republicans’ plan is not fully developed, but we know that they things they don’t like are the things that keep the insurance pool of young and healthy enough that premiums can be kept at an affordable level.

    What the GOP is going to attempt to do would be unpopular even if they had better intentions for many of the same reasons that Obamacare has struggled to maintain widespread support. People will be forced to change plans and doctors. Insurance companies will stop serving their market. They’ll get blamed for premium hikes even if, somehow, those hikes are lower than they have been in the past.

    To avoid some of this, they’ll need to avoid messing up the scheme, but they can’t do that if they break the scheme apart.

    Most importantly, they’ve arranged things so that they need only fifty votes in the Senate to mess things up but still need sixty (and a majority in the House) to fix them. Republicans won’t want to replace what they’ve just repealed, especially the things they hate. So, it looks like an impossible task to replace Obamacare with anything that would work.

  137. 137.

    hovercraft

    @Kay:

    He’s bewildered why he doesn’t have any money after he collected much less.

    I think red state voters should “reduce” their tax burden, when they calculate their state taxes, they should pay 90% giving themselves a tax cut. Enclose a note with your check stating that as a staunch conservatives who believe reducing taxes increases revenue, you are doing your part to stimulate economic activity. You are keeping more of your money and spending it much more efficiently than the government ever could, so you’re welcome. Seriously, how are they still selling the same zombie lie after 40 years of it being demonstrably proven to be exactly what Poppy said it was Voodoo economics. People are stupid, period, they want to be lied to, there is no other explanation, deluding yourselves into believing that you can get something for nothing and then getting pissed because, you can’t, is the entirety of the GOP playbook.

  141. 141.

    hovercraft

    @David Canadian Anchor Baby Koch:
    You are barely scratching the surface, much to republicans chagrin, there will many, many more places and things named after Barry O, and it will not come about as a stealth project to plaster his name on things across the country as part of an effort to rehabilitate his name and legacy. The GOP and media may have tried to whitewash him, but there are plenty of us who remember his calamitous reign. The income inequality everyone has suddenly realized is a huge problem got it’s biggest impetus during the Reagan years, union busting was great for business, but it was also a major step in the ongoing destruction of the middle class.

  142. 142.

    Aleta

    Even in the last two days Obama must work furiously to rectify more horrific damage of past politicians that has just been let lie until now.

  143. 143.

    Jeffro

    @rikyrah: @rikyrah:
    – military parades
    – Blackwater advisers
    – private security in the WH
    – aides with a history of hired of thuggery
    – banning the press from the WH
    – hiring bikers to attend the inauguration and post-inaugural march
    – firing the head of the DC national guard

    What could possibly go wrong?

  146. 146.

    rikyrah

    @O. Felix Culpa:

    Ms. O now works in a disability-related field. Parents of children with disabilities are also fierce advocates, which is why we have the ADA and similar provisions. Ms. DeVos won’t know what hit her if she starts messing with the disability community.

    You can bet on it. She’s gonna mess with them.

  148. 148.

    Matt McIrvin

    I wish I had any confidence that posterity will regard history intelligently. The history books I used in school had a bunch of weirdly ambiguous pro-Confederate stuff in them, over a hundred years after that war was over, and even liberals like to write “counterintuitive” garbage today about how Nixon, probably the closest thing we’ve had up to now to an autocratic strongman, was really all right and more liberal than today’s liberals.

  152. 152.

    Jeffro

    Personally I’m still trying to figure out which is the most offensive part of Don the Con’s inaugural poem…I mean, I know that’s the point (to offend and distract) but for these

    When freedom is threatened by slavery’s chains
    And voices are silenced as misery reigns,
    We’ll come out for a leader whose courage is true
    Whose virtues are solid and long overdue.

    Riiiiight…’misery’ these past 8 years…Donald’s ‘virtues are solid’…

    The Domhnall’s a giver whilst others just take,
    Ne’er gaining from that which his hands did not make.
    A builder of buildings, employing good men,
    He’s enriched many cities by factors of ten.

    Yes…he only gains from actually creating things (not, say, licensing his name or by stiffing people on the bill…)

    True friend of the migrant from both far and near,
    He welcomes the worthy, but guards our frontier,
    Lest a murderous horde, for whom hell is the norm,
    Should threaten our lives and our nation deform.

    “hell is the norm”…”our nation deform”…really, the nightmares this guy must have…

    There’s plenty more but those have to be the worst three segments. I think Bannon must have ghost-written it one night while on a bender.

    How could any person even semi-awake for the past 8 years read those lines with a straight face?? I’d bust out laughing. The Bubble, strong it is…

  155. 155.

    Chris

    @Kay:

    Hassen was actually very generous. She set up the question by relating that she has a son who is disabled, which to anyone who had any idea what was going on would be time to prepare- “I”m about to be asked a question about students with disabilities so thank God for this long lead-up!” but even then DeVos was baffled. DeVos NEVER got it- she had no idea was Hassen was talking about.

    I haven’t been following the transcripts, but by the sound of it, seems like (except for some of the national security positions) these hearings are all basically running on the same level as Sarah Palin’s 2008 interviews. When she was being asked questions as ridiculously softball as “what newspapers do you read?” but couldn’t even answer those coherently, and then ran sobbing to Fox News that the mean liberals were bullying her with Gotcha Questions. (Like “what newspapers do you read?”)

  156. 156.

    Chris

    @Kay:

    Under this theory, no one has to learn anything before doing any job and no one who has a job learns anything from experience.

    So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all these years.

    “What are your qualifications?”
    “Well, I’ve done all this data entry for A, B, and C companies, all this research for X, Y, and Z companies, some research and analysis for Y and Z companies. I’ve also been a cashier for this, that, and the other one to help pay for college. And I was very good at all of that. The best! Believe me.”
    “… Sir, this is the interview for the neurosurgeon position.”
    “Exactly! I have no expertise in that whatsoever! You couldn’t ask for a better candidate! Fresh minds! New ideas!”
    “Sir, neurosurgery is very complicated work. You have to be able to operate things like, well, brain tumors and – ”
    “Brain tumors? Is that a thing?”
    “Sir?”
    “I’m sure that’s not a thing. It doesn’t sound real.”
    “I assure you, it is.”
    “Well I’ve never had one.”
    “Sir, ask every surgeon in this hospital. I assure you, it’s very real.”
    “Every surgeon in this hospital says it’s real?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Everyone agrees with each other? That doesn’t strike you as a little bit suspicious? Like maybe you’re living in a bubble? God, I got here just in time. With me, you’ll finally have another opinion! In a few years you’re going to wonder how you ever got along without me!”

    I’d be a Facebook meme by nightfall. But do the exact same thing in front of a Senate committee, and you’re the latest VSP.

  157. 157.

    Chris

    @Betty Cracker:

    Were American elites always this fucking lame?

    No, I don’t think they were. I think the sense of “noblesse oblige” is overemphasized in their past, but I think they, especially the ones running the show from the Civil War until about a hundred years later, were smarter in a more farsighted kind of way – the kind that’s capable of saying “if I part with a little money now it’ll profit me later.” That’s what’s missing today, when we’ve got a bunch of nearsighted cretins obsessed with extreme short term gain, zero sum loss games, and indulging their own weird whims and prejudices. It’s the “sane billionaires versus insane billionaires” thing.

  159. 159.

    Ella in New Mexico

    @Kay:

    This is very populist, but would I like to see in an education secretary is someone who retrained. DeVos likes to talk about how the working classes need to buckle down and take some community college classes after work so they can apply at Google or whatever, but that’s actually really hard. We’re talking about 50 or 60 hour weeks while working and raising children.

    And it won’t always be at a time in their lives when they can just quit work and go back to school–they’re often right smack in the middle of life, when they really can’t just “quit their job and go back to school”. Lots of people will have only one way to fund their educations: student loans. I added something like 38K to my student loan debt at age 45 when I got my BSN. Even though I make way better money as an nurse than I ever have in my life, our last two out of four kids are still in college and we’ve had to borrow for them, too, because we’re feverishly trying to catch up for retirement.

    I work with people who are being heavily pressured to get a Bachelor’s in Nursing instead of the community college ADN they hold, and they’re finding that it’s expensive and time consuming (which cuts into how many hours they can work) and are having to go into debt to do it. This summer I’m going back for a Nurse Practitioner’s degree, and I’m weighing just how long I can keep working full or part time before I have to borrow more money. I’m pretty confident that I’ll have quit working for about a year, and there’s no way I can afford to do that without loans. Fortunately, I may have some assistance paying them back because my state has some service for loan forgiveness programs, but most folks won’t have this kind of option for other fields of study.

    Something people don’t realize is that community college is often a great entryway into the work force, but it will most likely not sustain a lifetime career. Most people will need to advance their education above the CC level to get better paying jobs or because their employer demands it. It’s way more expensive to do that, particularly for this new plethora of online programs which charge pretty hefty tuitions and fees.

    But I’m sure Betsy D. will fix ALL OF THAT

  160. 160.

    grrljock

    I call that big airport north of Houston, TX “Intergalactic” (old Rice U joke). And the DC airport “National”. Why yes, I’m petty.

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