Yesterday I went to my first massage since I came to Tempe (I usually go once a month at home). At any rate, Joelle found some place that specializes in deep tissue massage and includes bodywalking, which is exactly what it sounds like- they walk on you. And let me tell you, I feel like someone walked on me. At some point during the massage she was walking on the back of my thigh, slipped a little, and I took a foot to the unmentionables. And yet that still was not as painful as reading the news.
The news:
The Education Department announced on Tuesday that it was firing more than 1,300 workers, effectively gutting the agency that manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools.
The layoffs mean that the department, which started the year with 4,133 employees, will now have a work force of about half that size after less than two months with President Trump in office. In addition to the 1,315 workers who were fired on Tuesday, 572 employees accepted separation packages offered in recent weeks and 63 probationary workers were terminated last month.
The cuts could portend an additional move by Mr. Trump to essentially dismantle the department, as he has said he wants to do, even though it cannot be closed without the approval of Congress.
I wish I could explain the amount of chaos this is going to cause, doubly so since they are doing it in the middle of the school year. Putting aside the fact that they claim they are going to spin much of it off into other departments (student loans to treasury, disability and special needs to HHS, etc.), they will not only never be able to spin that up in those departments, but they are gutting all the other departments so who the fuck is supposed to do it, and they will not be able to do it midstream.
This means that FAFSA loan processing and shit like that are going to just fucking explode, and hundreds of thousands of kids are going to learn prior to or midway through their education that they can not longer afford it. And that is not taking into account all the special needs and autistic students, disabled kids, etc., who are going to watch their support systems just evaporate.
On top of that, they intend to push things onto the state and local governments, who, because of 40 years of tax cut jeebus ruling supreme, already are running on a wing and a prayer, and will not be able to make up the slack and do not have the personnel- many states don’t even have enough teachers and are just throwing idiots off the street into the classroom. And that isn’t even going into the fact that education is funded in most places through property taxes, and the disparate impact on poor locales will exacerbate an already unfair system.
This is going to be a monumental clusterfuck and if you thought test scores dropped because of covid, strap the fuck in.
Oh, I forgot- here is proof of life that Thurston is still with us.
War for Ukraine Day 1,111: Truce?
Urza
Impoverishing the US has been a goal of the rightwing donors for decades. Drive down wages. Voters never considered their kids would be worthless in any job market of course, let alone one that will require extreme amounts of knowledge to keep up with AI.
John Revolta
Two kicks in the yarbles in one day!
Nowadays we call that- Tuesday.
RaflW
JFC. Gavin Newsom’s Monday guest on his pod was Michael Savage.
I have to agree with Will Bunch, who said in his column How Gavin Newsom ended his White House bid before it began column, “Newsom even released a picture of him smiling with Kirk, like the two men had just shot an endangered rhino or something.”
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Meanwhile, ICE is one federal agency still running strong, keeping us safe from British backpackers.
RaflW
@Urza: The thing I keep circling back to is a commenter who said a while ago, “These folks are so determined, they’d much rather have a bigger slice of a small pie, even if their total nominal wealth also declines.” It’s a mindset that seems really messed up, but it sure seems like part of where they’re trying to take us.
I think what we just don’t know is how the public reacts as shit falls apart. Orban-style authoritarianism at least started with the ingroup getting some goodies, not just whapped with sticks.
Chetan Murthy
@RaflW: It’s _Fight Club_ made real-life. In the movie, they want to burn it all down, b/c they’re not on top. B/c literally Ed Norton isn’t gettin’ together with Helena Bonham Carter. This is how status works, right? You don’t need antibiotics, or working cars, or electricity: what you need, is to be on top of the heap. That’s what they want, and they -do- understand that burning it all down help them to that goal.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Urza:
“AI” is overhyped though, isn’t it?
Draco7
@RaflW:
Dan Savage would have made for a better podcast. As far as the public waiting for even more shit/fan interaction, all I can say is that sometimes I wish we were French. The country would have been shut down by now.
Ohio Mom
The Cincinnati temperatures will be in the low 70s this week, which means it’s too warm to continue wearing my pink pussy hat.
It inspired a surprising number of conversations, mostly with young women who hate Trump. I was expecting a few run-ins with MAGAs but that never happened. Maybe they couldn’t quite place the hat?
I looked briefly online for a summer version but didn’t find anything. I’m not sure what to do next, I am not a tee shirt with images person.
P.S. Thanks for mentioning special ed students, Cole
Chetan Murthy
I certainly don’t know the history here. I googled a little, and found mostly discussion about his anti-immigrant rhetoric and fearmongering. But you could be right. Certainly the Nazis -did- cater to their base’s material needs, even diverting resources from rearmament to address issues in housing, clothing, and food. And of course, the dispossession and murder of Jewish Europeans was not just a matter of “kill ’em all”, but also about taking their stuff to give to the Nazi base. That these bargain-basement Nazis are actually less competent than the OG Nazis is …. sumthin’.
Westyny
As a long-term college professor, I’m glad I’m retiring. I even gave my school an extra year at half time, so I didn’t cut and run. But my younger colleagues are staring at the shit tsunami that’s coming our way, and I don’t envy them.
YY_Sima Qian
It’s already Wednesday where I am, the national suicide continues apace.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@RaflW:
I just don’t get this. Does he honestly think this will help him become president? What happened to the guy from 2004 who defied state law to have the SF city-county clerk issue same-sex marriage licenses?
I guess this guy was always a slimeball. I remember he broke Covid protocol in 2020 just to have his hair cut or something while everyone else was trying to not die
waspuppet
Proven moron Linda McMahon told a Fox moron (who actually managed to bring up the fact that only Congress can eliminate a department and that not necessarily even all Republicans want to do it) the quiet part out loud: They just want to “slim down” the department and “give more of the money to the states keep paying, where it works better” (paraphrase, but a close one).
Translation: pre-Brown schools, but blue states keep paying for them.
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): It was to host a dinner for big-ticket donors at The French Laundry in Marin. But you’ve just seen why so many of us Californians simply don’t trust the man.
Math Guy
What are Cletus and Billy-Bob going to do when their mother-in-laws get kicked out of the nursing home and have to move into the front room?
gene108
@RaflW:
It’s been a pretty consistent mindset throughout U.S. history. The antebellum South was the embodiment of this mindset.
I hope all the Republican voting people in Republican run states get what they voted for. They have no excuse to not know what Trump is.
Martin
@Chetan Murthy: Yeah, I wasn’t exactly thrilled when he became governor, then showed up and did a better job than I was expecting, and now I’m remembering why my original instinct was what it was.
I still think AOC should run in 28. She’s fearless. She doesn’t cave.
Sister Golden Bear
@RaflW: Steven Bannon was just announced as an upcoming guest on Newsom’s show. Words fail…
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
It was like a gut-punch seeing the news he had that loser chud Charlie Kirk on. Of all fucking people. He might as well have Ben Shaprio on as a guest.
I wonder if Newsom’s catching hell from Californians for this? I’d be curious to know when that Micheal Savage episode was recorded
gene108
@Chetan Murthy:
Paul Krugman interviewed Kim Lane Scheppele, who studied Orban’s rise to power. Part of the interview is below. Worth reading.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/from-orban-to-trump-part-ii
Jobeth
@Sister Golden Bear: I read somewhere that Bill Maher is thinking about quitting his show citing not wanting to do another four years of Trump. Maybe Newsom’s auditioning to take his place as the scoldy liberal. Fuck ‘em both.
prostratedragon
@Ohio Mom: Pussy ears tacked onto your Tilly?
Martin
@RaflW: I didn’t say that but noted something similar that a lot of small/medium town business people, who constitute a lot of Trumps base are basically local lords. They own their town, nothing happens without their okay. They may not be billionaires but they have power, and they’d rather have the power than the billions.
Trump has a lot of money, but he came up in the biggest of big money cities, and the NYC folks with REAL money thought he was a selfish dipshit and rejected him from the entire social scene. He fucking hated that. He thought he should be a lord with his money, but was relegated to be a nobody until NBC picked him up.
Matt McIrvin
@gene108: I saw someone recently describe Curtis Yarvin as someone who wants to turn our society into a Barbadian sugar plantation and thinks it’s medieval feudalism.
bluefoot
@Sister Golden Bear: what is Newsom thinking??? You don’t try to understand Nazis and you certainly don’t give them a platform.
i met Newsom back in the early 90s I think. He struck me then as a fairly empty guy who had a lot of ambition and a timeline. It look me years before I got past that first impression….and now here we are.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Sister Golden Bear:
Was this before or after the backlash to the Charlie Kirk episode?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Saw a billboard earlier today. It was an ad for a gun store.
It had the D.O.G.E acronym.
It then spelled it out as Department of Gun Envy. Ha, get it libtards!?
I mean Jesus Christ, can’t these people read a room? I’m half tempted to call the place and tell them to fuck off
jonas
Hoo boy, is this going to be a fun episode of Leopards Eating People’s Faces.
Cheryl from Maryland
The 1995 film Canadian Bacon (where a defense contractor shuts down his munitions factory in Niagara Falls, the locals go anti-Canada, a slimy advisor to the President tries to urge him to war – Russia or Canada, what’s the difference) is free on Tubi. John Candy’s last film. It wasn’t well received in 95, but I just watched it now. It’s hilarious and sad. Did you know that Canada is a threat to the US because they have universal health care? Did you know that US special ops can invade Canada wearing red plaid?
Chetan Murthy
@gene108: I’m listening to it right now. Thank you for this!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Looks at release date: 1995
Huh.
Ohio Mom
@gene108: The was a very enlightening interview.
Chetan Murthy
@Ohio Mom: Seconded. Seconded. Eye-opening.
NotMax
Fluffing Musk.
A staged event (“Ooh, I like that one. It matches my baseball cap.”) any self-respecting member of the press ought to have fled within the first minute.
SectionH
@Martin: exactly my thoughts about Newsom.
After the fuckup about High Speed rail, I was giving Jerry cred that Newsom was an ok successor. But trusted him? NEVER.
And now I see that Katie Porter is running for Gov?
This San Diegan is gonna have calls to Toni and Terra and WTAF?
edited to add: my first thought about Porter was that she needs money, and that’s how she’s gonna get it.
Martin
@SectionH: Gov race is going to be brutal.
Sister Golden Bear
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): After both the Charlie Kirk and Micheal Savage episodes.
Ohio Mom
@jonas: Re: Leopards eating faces: Oh yes, there are plenty of Republican special needs families here in my corner of Ohio. I am looking forward to their Oh Crap moments.
Chetan Murthy
@gene108: @RaflW: at 27m in, Scheppele explains that Orban brought back social programs that had been eliminated previously. “Orban didn’t create that kind of pain”.
cain
A lot of Gen Zs and Gen Alpha are going to be really fucking pissed. Their parents are also going to be pissed. MAGA: At least you won’t have student loans now! You can join us here in good paying minimum wage jobs where we can’t afford anything.
I think within 6 months, it’s going to be so absolutely painful for everyone that shit’s going to go down hard.
cain
@Ohio Mom: The Leopards eating my face subreddit has been fun to read. Right now, it’s just a trickle. But it’s going to be a roar in August as everyone’s college and school plans go bust in at least the red states.
NotMax
@cain
“So much winning.”
// // // // //
Darkrose
A big part of my job is helping students find sources for their research. This quarter’s been especially busy; I’ve had two hour-long consults scheduled daily almost every week. Today I had an art history student researching an 18th-century print in the style of William Hogarth (“The Rake’s Progress”), and an English major doing a thesis on the influence of Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” on postmodernism. Seeing these students so excited about their research makes me happy.
Then I think about how the WWE sex abuse enabler wants education to be about the “workforce” and I want to cry. Conservatives hate art, because it can help people be empathetic, and there’s nothing they hate more.
SectionH
@Sister Golden Bear: What do you think about Toni Atkins? AFAIK she’s only announced for Lt Gov, but damn she’s amazing.
@Martin: Yeah. Also what do you think about Toni?
And to be clear, the closest to Toni Atkins I’ve ever been were her Holiday cards for when she was just our rep in the Assembly.
Darkrose
@Sister Golden Bear: It’s not like running the largest state in the country is a full-time job or anything.
The one good thing about it is that to the people he’s courting, he’ll always be the whackjob lefty governor of weirdo California.
Gretchen
A Columbia PhD student who was studying language delays in small children lost his funding today. My NY grandson has a language delay and we’re hoping some young scholar can figure out what to do about it. This guy is trying, and Musk says no.
Craig
@Chetan Murthy: I thought Ed Norton’s character was getting with Marla Singer. Isn’t that the thing?
geg6
THURSTON! Who’s a good boy? Who’s an adorable boy? You! You are!
I cannot even find the words for what devastation this will cause. The only good thing was my decision to retire last September. I cannot imagine the conversations financial aid administrators are going to be having. This is the height of recruitment season for schools and financial aid packages should have or will soon be going out. But how can you package when you have no idea what aid will be available, how quickly it will be processed or, for many schools, if they’ll even be able to operate after losing federal funding of all kinds? I feel for all my former colleagues.
eclare
Yay Thurston!
YY_Sima Qian
Now, Australia following the footsteps of Europe & Canada:
My impression is that Dziedric has been one of the most pro-US voices in Australia.
Urza
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I think its overhyped. I saw a comment recently that AI is incredibly good for the things you don’t know, but only 60% right on the things you do know. That about sums up my experience. If you don’t know you can’t figure out how bad it is and if you do know you have to pay alot of attention to make sure its not giving bad info.
CEOs however don’t care and will be happy to replace anyone on the hype as soon as they can figure out how. Plus there’s a push for humanoid robots for warehouses, cleaning houses and other things. The warehouse ones are supposedly pretty good already.
hitchhiker
Because I have masochism issues, I started back at the beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale. Read it in my pre-children days, watched the episodes as they appeared, beginning in the first president thug era.
I have to say, it’s much, much more dire this time around, now that I really understand how ignorant and gullible and cruel people are. Atwood has said many times that everything she wrote into that novel had a historical source. Ritualized rape. Forbidden literacy. Strict caste society. Insane religious cults. Public hangings. Hands chopped off. Stoning. Legal kidnapping. Slavery. Deep misogyny.
Toward the end of the last season to air, there’s a plot line about how after six years Canadians are getting dead sick of all these mooching refugees from Gilead — the former USA — who were at first welcomed and cared for. It’s really something to watch (fictional) regular Americans being subjected to the whole “go home, motherfuckers” treatment.
As someone who spent most of my adult life in education, training, instructional design, curriculum development, and who has always known that learning is everything — today was horrifying. It was bad enough to have that stupid MLM woman on the cabinet running the DOE. Now we have a 76-yr-old fake wrestling promoter who was fine with boys getting sexually abused.
And she answers to a thug, whom she has admired for decades. I just can’t, people.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Urza: Why? It seems so inexplicably stupid
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Seems so. Recipes featuring deadly mushrooms, hallucinating case law
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
He does have parts of LA to rebuild and a “very stable genius” to get in his way while he tries to do it. Idk if that is why he has gone con-lite. Maybe?
Did you notice the House CR contains nothing for any of LA’s fires? Red states and cons sure like California money. Would it not be excellent if CA GOP stopped funding them? It probably won’t happen. An American can dream though.
dc
How can it be legal to just fire federal employees? They have legal protections.
sentient ai from the future
@RaflW: phrased more pithily as “they’d slit their own throats so long as they thought they’d get to drown a liberal in the blood”
sentient ai from the future
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): tht guy who defied state law also got a lot of earned press out of it, after the voters had narrowly passed prop 8.
But he was nowhere to be found when he could have used his executive authority, comp!etely legally, to get more bike parking and bike lanes put in when the plan was challenged by right wingers because it didn’t have an air quality impact report.
Why yes, I am still salty about that.
prostratedragon
The master of engendering hatred unneccessarily at work:
Super Dave
One of my sons still has student debt. He’s been paying $1,000 per month on his debt. He told me he can no longer get to the website to make his payments, can’t reach anyone to find out what to do. So it sounds like they’ve effectively cancelled the debt, since there’s no way to pay. Except I suspect they’ll eventually come after anyone who doesn’t pay, no matter the reason.
sentient ai from the future
@Super Dave: in the waning days of the Biden admin they arranged it so that many/all of the servicers’ websites and payments went through dept of ed servers.
So of course when they blow it up, they destroyed the ability to get any information about that at all.
Some bankruptcy lawyers gonna get some class action practice, I guess.
JWR
@waspuppet:
Which is what they want to do with FEMA, among so many other programs. “Let the states do it”,“just give “em a block grant.” Fuckers. And then there’s this, from earlier tonight, set to start at about the 1:45 mark:
Is Unger reliable? I know he’s been on the “Trump as Russian asset” beat for quite a while now, but I haven’t followed him that closely. Interesting interview, though.
JGreen
@Sister Golden Bear:
I’ll be the first to say it. I don’t know when it will happen, but Newsom will suddenly declare that he’s switching to the Republicans. He will be one of those “I didn’t leave the party, the party left me” assholes.
He’s figuring that Trump won’t go for a third term and the field will be wide open. As someone else said, he probably will still be looked at as a goddam California liberal by the right wing, but he thinks he can put on an act that they will go for. I hope it doesn’t work and that we can come up with someone really good in 2028. But, I really don’t want to have to be working on 2028 right now (you can if you want to).
cain
@JGreen: Newsom wants to be a cult figure..
Shalimar
@JWR: Fuck the states. We got a peek into what the states do when they get to decide with Mississippi, who gave millions intended to help the poor to Brett Favre to give bootstrap speeches.
sab
@Math Guy: These guys have no intention of letting MIL into their house.
Thor Heyerdahl
@Urza: AI is like a certain cologne in “Anchorman”
Rachel Bakes
College freshman awaiting this year’s FAFSA notice. The other end is a special needs child with lots of school-provided services. Thank heaven we’re in CT! A friend with a special needs daughter moved to rural SC last year and has been bemoaning the drop in services. Just you wait! Not sure why her RWNJ husband insisted on buying a factory in a field they know nothing about in a state that would spit on their daughter and offer poor education to the rest of their kids.
siddhartha
I would also recommend reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved (apologies if already read) because before there was Gilead there was Sweet Home. Whatever is shown in The Handmaid’s Tale is not futuristic. It has already happened to black women. Their wombs were/are this country’s biggest production site: for the plantation or for the Prison Industrial Complex (1 in 3 black men vs. 1 in 17 white men, for example).
AM in NC
@Math Guy: AND their special needs kids are now at home too because no supports for them at school.
also can’t wait to see the slightly wealthier MAGA chuds deal with no IEPs for their ADHD kids and no FAFSAs being processed for little Saxon and Annabelle.
Ken B
@cain: Income inequality in this country is already substantially worse than it was in France in 1789.
Professor Bigfoot
@JWR: If Trump really WAS a Russian asset, what would he be doing differently?
William of Ockham says “that motherfucker is a Russian asset.”
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
He’d be doing the same things more competently.
So there’s hope.
mrmoshpotato
@Sister Golden Bear:
Wow
Can we stop this ride? I’ve had enough after less than 2 months.
owlbrick
@AM in NC: This right here… there’s so much that the DoEd does that people don’t seem to realize. Like everything else in the federal government that they are gleefully setting fire to, people are unaware of it until they find out how much they actually depend on it. Special ed and IEPs and residential care are more widely used than people seem to realize
Bokonon
Maybe Newsom would make the calculation that aggressive voter suppression coupled with the GOP’s funding and media advantages make it unlikely that a Democrat will win the Presidency for many years to come.
I am figuring that the GOP’s new boldness on slashing Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security reflects a similar calculation – that they now have a lot of built in advantages, and don’t have to worry about popular sentiment so much, and just need to focus on keeping their own base happy.