Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The revolution will be supervised.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

“Alexa, change the president.”

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

The willow is too close to the house.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

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Odds & Ends Open Thread

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The kids are alright!  I hope Gloria Johnson wins the seat.

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In case you haven’t seen this ad yet, it’s really powerful.

Biden cancels $37 million dollars of student loans for former students of the “University of Phoenix”  (CNN)

The Biden administration is canceling nearly $37 million of federal student loan debt for more than 1,200 borrowers who attended the University of Phoenix because it found that the for-profit school misled students about job prospects.

Taking a narrower approach to student debt forgiveness, the Biden administration has continued to cancel some borrowers’ debts under existing programs after the Supreme Court blocked its broad student loan forgiveness program that promised to forgive up to $20,000 for low- and middle-income borrowers.

Similar to Wednesday’s announcement about the University of Phoenix, the Department of Education canceled $72 million in federal student loan debt in August for more than 2,300 borrowers who attended the for-profit Ashford University in California.

Altogether, the administration has canceled more than $117 billion of the nearly $1.7 trillion of outstanding federal student loan debt since 2021.

National Voter Registration Day!  Taylor Swift urged her 232 million followers on Instagram to register to vote at Vote.org – that should leave a mark!

Totally open thread.

Reader Interactions

50Comments

  1. 1.

    RaflW

    Hoping this helps, even just a little, on our over performance in 2024: Tommy Tuberville just voted against confirming General Charles Brown as the next Joint Chief of Staff.

    He wasn’t just posturing and preening on abortion. He really does just flat out hate our military. What a p.o.s.

  2. 2.

    WaterGirl

    @RaflW:  He was clearly screwed either way, glad he took that path that might screw himself the most.

    He looks like a hypocrite if he votes to confirm.  He looks like he doesn’t give a flying fuck about the military if he doesn’t.  I think door #2 hurts him the most.

  5. 5.

    Scout211

    That Beshear ad is so good!

    Yes, Democrats, this is exactly how to campaign.  What a brave young woman.

  7. 7.

    bbleh

    Haw haw haw, them wimmin ain’t gon’ vote, not like they ain’t told to anyway, and ‘specially them young wimmin, they never vote ever!

    [Narrator]: Oops.

  9. 9.

    Lyrebird

    @Scout211: ​
     What a brave young woman.

    Same here, exactly those words came to mine as soon as I heard her speak.

    And good on the Beshear campaign for boldly speaking the bald truth instead of trying to appease.

    Thanks WG for highlighting these!

  10. 10.

    Kayla Rudbek

    Reposted from below: Good, a open thread, so a question for the jackal community: anyone ever used self-adhesive vinyl tiles as backsplash for a kitchen wall? If so, do you have any brand recommendations or suggestions? I have a space 16 inches high and 130 inches wide, so I am looking at 4×4 inches tiles on Amazon. Something to coordinate with blue/gray marbled Formica is preferable.

  11. 11.

    NotMax

    @Kayla Rudbek

    Also reposted from below as a reply.

    No recommendation per se but will suggest taking into consideration when settling on a product whether the space is just a wall or if it (or part of it) is a backsplash and/or subject to the heat and fumes (grease) accompanying a stove top.

  15. 15.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    So its great that debt is being cancelled for deceptive, trash schools like the University of Phoenix, but what is being done to get the money back or prevent it from going to those schools in the first place? I mean, they shouldn’t get a dime of federal money going forward and should be sued for fraud.

  18. 18.

    Matt McIrvin

    I don’t think I realized until recently how viscerally angry people get about student loan forgiveness. But it seems to really specifically rankle some people I know. That people could take out student loans they can’t afford and not be punished for it– they just take that as a deep moral outrage against responsibility.

  25. 25.

    bbleh

    @Dan B: obviously some kind of hormonal response.  We really need to rethink this whole 19th Amendment thing.  For the sake of the country.  Harrumph.

  26. 26.

    piratedan

    @geg6: agreed and she seems to understand that while she is the “talent” is that she doesn’t do it alone and takes care of the people that surround her and her tour.

    She genuinely cares about her fans and her family and appears to be very well grounded.

  27. 27.

    Lyrebird

    @HumboldtBlue: Seems to be fifty fifty for my Firefox, like I am in visual mode right now, no problem, but for my reply to Scout211 I had to be in the Text window, couldn’t see anything in the Visual window

    ETA for WaterGirl in case she wants this:   Firefox 117.0.1 on a beat-up used Dell Latitude from work

  29. 29.

    hotshoe

    I don’t remember who it was, pretty sure it was one of y’all who suggested Wordplay (instead of FTNYT wordle),
    Today’s daily #262 is, ugh, a difficult letter combo plus a bit unusual in English vocabulary. Okay, I didn’t lose in the end, tough game but still fun.
    So thanks whoever you are for suggesting Wordplay!

  30. 30.

    Suzanne

    @Matt McIrvin: I mean, I get mad that “public” universities call themselves that when taxpayer money only covers approximately 10-15% of the cost of attendance in many states. Totally the same. ;)

  31. 31.

    MisterDancer

    @HumboldtBlue: This website HATES Firefox, I can no longer use the visual tab, text only, and it’s terribly frustrating because there is no formatting

    I use Firefox (Win11) and actually the visual tab just started working regularly for me a few weeks ago. That was after months of having it flake out on the regular; I could get Visual mode only after multiple reloads, sometimes. That’s not an issue I’ve run into of late.

  36. 36.

    frosty

    @MisterDancer: ​I use Firefox on Win 11 and every comment seems to default to Text. It’s a PITA. Edit comment is randomly Text or Visual.
    Oh well, the burdens of life (and FYWP) we put up with. Sigh.​

  39. 39.

    wjca

    @WaterGirl: He was clearly screwed either way, glad he took that path that might screw himself the most.

    He looks like a hypocrite if he votes to confirm.  He looks like he doesn’t give a flying fuck about the military if he doesn’t.  I think door #2 hurts him the most.

    If he wasn’t dumber than dirt, it might have occurred to him that his least bad option, politically, would have been to just not be there for the vote. But he is — dumber than dirt, that is.

    Too bad it’s so long before Alabama (and the rest of us) can get rid of him.

  40. 40.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I don’t think I realized until recently how viscerally angry people get about student loan forgiveness.

    I get viscerally angry about people who cheat on/evade taxes. Costs about $1 trillion. PER YEAR. Total college debt is estimated at $1.75 trillion.

  41. 41.

    RaflW

    @Sure Lurkalot: They cheat twice, because they also spent some of their riches to have a tax code written that already favors them grossly. And then they underpay on even that beneficial scheme.

  42. 42.

    Shalimar

    @Matt McIrvin: If these viscerally angry people went to college in the 20th century, they can go to hell with their judgmental bullshit.  They have no clue how much more a degree costs than it did then, how much less states subsidize than they used to, and how salary stagnation means you can spend a lifetime just paying back the loan with no real benefit for getting it.

  45. 45.

    206inKY

    In 2019, I knocked on literally hundreds of doors for Beshear. We had to claw out every vote to manifest the impossible—and it worked.

    This time around, Beshear is dominating in yard signs and the vibe is very different. Knock on wood, I think he will romp. Dobbs changed everything, and Beshear isn’t afraid.

  47. 47.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Shalimar: ah, but you see, if “the government got out of it” market forces would fix everything and college would be affordable again, or else people wouldn’t waste money on useless humanities degrees.

    I think a lot of what annoys me about politics today isn’t that it got worse, it’s that a lot of stuff that used to sound reasonable to me doesn’t any more. 30 years ago I might have found all this prima facie plausible, while considering myself a liberal Democrat.

  48. 48.

    JML

    @Shalimar: There’s a few different things fueling the rage against student loan forgiveness. Yes, you have the people who went to college in the 80’s or earlier when public school were much more affordable (the defunding of public universities started in the 90’s, BTW, with the Gingrich Republicans leading the charge) who think people are getting a big giveaway on their dime.

    You also have the cadre of people who graduated in the 2000’s who either paid off their loans or have little left and bring the attitude of “once again, I’m not going to benefit from this and everyone else will”. And you have the people who didn’t go to college, who have been told to rage against those effete liberal college people who supposedly look down on them anyways, and why should they get anything?

    For 40+ years the US has been subjected to a culture of selfishness (I blame the goddamn Reagan “Revolution” for so much of this, but it’s been in everything: music, tv, politics, culture: all that matters is that I get mine) and that’s the biggest part of what drives this. No policy should happen if I don’t personally benefit from it. We’ve completely lost the plot when it comes to taking care of our community as a whole, and it’s the core tenet of GOP politics if they have one. It’s why they push the narrative that government assistance programs are “giveaways” that let people coast through life while the “normal” people have to work.

    Great distraction from the massive wealth transfer that’s happened as they keep siphoning money away from working people to the wealthiest in the country, creating more and more income inequality and concentration of wealth at the top. And they sell it by convincing people that they can be part of that wealth if it wasn’t for those bloodsuckers at the bottom taking from them, when the reality is the damage is done by the rich.

  49. 49.

    WaterGirl

    @hotshoe: I know I suggested WordPlay – I have totally abandoned Worlds because the NYT ruined it for me.  So I’ll accept your thanks, but I may not be the only one!

    I feel good if I get the word in 3 or 4, but there have been some really tough ones.

Comments are closed.