Every time I point out that the average American reading comprehension level is 7th to 10th grade people think I'm lying. But only 30% of Americans have college degrees. Our literacy rate is improving but it's not great https://t.co/7O9MnxdXg7
— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) October 26, 2021
When I was in junior high (in the 1960s), and starting to read about the first Gilded Age, I noticed one of the standard tropes of that era was the terror that ‘Real Americans’ — upper-class white Protestant men — were being ‘crowded out’ of Ivy League institutions by the lower orders, i.e., pushy urban Jews and even Irish Catholics. (‘Asiatics’ were, blessedly, being legislated out of American citizenship; Italians and Eastern Europeans were condemned as subhumans too ignorant even to aspire to higher education; and any mention of ‘the Negro’ was avoided as unnecessarily lacerating to the finer sensibilities of the audience.)
It did not escape my perception that even back in the 1890s, ‘the best’ institutions of higher education were lauded because collegiates could make ‘the right connections, for a lifetime’… what we call networking. True, meritocracy was the mooted ideal of schools like Harvard and Yale — but a meritocracy restricted to rich white boys, plus a few exceptionally talented farm boys or middle-class city kids, who ‘could be trusted around the sisters’ of those rich white boys. (No hypogamous marriages for the female kin of the Princeton Man!)
Nor did the parallel terrors about ‘the Papist’ and ‘the Hebrew’ in the 1890s, and the ‘the Negro’ in the 1960s, go unremarked… and not just by me…
A lot of the push to stop subsidizing education is really about limiting who has access to opportunity. And yes, BIPOC people are the primary target of those measures, but so are low income white people. Just saying
— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) October 26, 2021
So much of the anti intellectualism and susceptibility to misinformation is about limiting competition because in terms of ingenuity…well, just look at how many ways tech keeps reinventing public buses…
— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) October 26, 2021
And a lot of "failing" inner city schools are outright sabotaged once their numbers start to get to high (I went to two such schools so stow it) because that's when budget cuts start to come in. You can do more with less, but nothing with nothing & districts know that
— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) October 26, 2021
Rusty
My view is the push for charter schools, paying families to home school, vouchers, it’s a way to finally just give a set amount of money for education to each family and leave it to them to figure it out. Tough luck if it’s totally inadequate for your special needs kid. The rich will use it to make their fancy private schools even nicer. It will be too little on its own for decent schooling so the poor will get shafted (as usual). The middle class will have to subsidize the amount to be able to afford a decent school, further shifting costs onto families. The whole system will be ripe for grifters and scam institutions. Whatever the initial amount is, it won’t ever go up. Either through cuts or just holding the amounts steady so inflation eats away at it, the burden will shift more and more away from the well to do. This is where I think we are really headed with education.
debbie
@Rusty:
Too many charters are grifter scams.
Earl
The reason startups keep trying to make buses work is that transit in the US works poorly. And public transit in sfbay is hilariously bad.
Or you could be an asshole and mock them.
She’s a lot less smart than she thinks she is if she thinks transit companies aren’t addressing a need that is unmet by our government. You may fairly say that government *should* address the need, but eh… look at sfbay and DC and then come tell me just how well that’s working.
trollhattan
Photographed the metro XC championships this afternoon on behalf of my kid’s former high school. The kids ran well, everybody cheered for everybody’s kid regardless of which team, it was a glorious 70-degree fall afternoon, and fuck anybody who harshes my mellow.
Also, the premiere runner on our team is one of the fastest girls in the country, so fun to watch.
Mike E
@trollhattan: Nice. It’s best to concentrate on exceptional humans, good for the heart.
NorthLeft12
Why do you think that teachers in the US are paid so poorly, and the quality of your elementary and secondary schools is completely dependent on the prosperity of the immediate community they are located in?
trollhattan
@Mike E:
Truth! Plus, being around kids is a tonic for aging bones. Also realizing (am generally slow on the uptake) that a lot of my neighborhood networking took place on the sidelines, which between covid and the kid heading off to college went off a cliff edge early 2020. Do not miss the office, but definitely miss that.
Omnes Omnibus
The best thing about XC. Everyone runs the same course in the same weather. Everyone trained doing the same miserable miles. There is an automatic bond between the best, the worst, and everyone in between. If you are have a bad race and are hurting, everyone else has been there before and knows they will again. They really can feel your pain.
Ohio Mom
The benchmark of the average reading comprehension level being around a sixth grade level has been pretty constant, forever. If it’s up to 7th-10th grade, that’s a big improvement.
After you master the basic mechanics of reading, comprehension mostly rests on the extent of the background knowledge you bring to the text. I once looked at a friend’s ham radio manual and I was completely at sea.
So much vocabulary I did not recognize. I remember reading the word “hat.” Sure, I know what a hat you wear on your head is, but not the “hat” that is part of a ham radio set-up. Without that knowledge, nothing in that sentence made any sense to me, even if I recognized all the other words.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
speaking of literacy…. this has had me intermittently chuckling since last night
Kent
The charter/voucher grift is all about looting public dollars. Schools are by far the largest single line-item in local budgets as any one who has looked at their property tax distributions will know. This is the way to loot that enormous pool of public dollars with the bonus side effect of destroying one of the last public unions that is loyally Democratic. Which is why Arne Duncan was by far Obama’s most egregiously bad appointment.
At the federal level most of the looting is done by defense contractors and the financial firms who manage 401(k) and pension plans. But at the local level charter schools and vouchers is how they loot the public purse.
It is also no coincidence that the degree of pressure for charters is directly proportional to the percentage of minority kids in the district or city.
joel hanes
Open thread?
Can anyone provide a link to the original Balloon Juice comment in which Davis X Machina first propounded his overpass sparrow curtain-rod law?
I know it’s in the Lexicon under 27-percenters, but I’d like to find the original in context. Google is no help, I’m guessing because the comment was made in the old comment system, and those comments are somehow no longer being indexed.
Is this comment accessible even in theory?
Or is it lost forever, like the LGM post from the night that vanderleun claimed to be aware of all internet traditions?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Going by the wide spread cheating scandals even the rich don’t value that education.
MisterForkbeard
Speaking of grifters, I’ve been on Cenk Unger’s mail list for awhile. Never read any of it.
Tonight he’s decided to turn against the reconciliation bill because “everything progressive has been stripped from the bill” and “democrats caved”.
What a fucking moron.
Oklahomo
@NorthLeft12:
The same poorly paid teachers who are expected to purchase their own supplies. My partner’s wife is a teacher, so if we get in paper samples (or in one case, 2500 sheets of perf paper with the perf wrong and the supplier telling us to trash it), we give it to her and her fellow teachers to help out.
The Oracle of Solace
As we saw in Kansas under Brownback, when people vote based on God, gays, and guns, the people for whom they vote can enrich themselves with tax cuts. Austerity codifies hierarchy—the rich get richer, so tax cuts assure that their dominance remains in place—and as long as these voters aren’t at the bottom of the hierarchy, they are content with their place in an otherwise uncertain universe.
eclare
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Oh wow! Although I had to Google the answer, I knew Homer was not of the Simpson variety.
Chetan Murthy
@Earl:
No, i could have one millionth of a bloody clue, and mock them. There are two reasons why these “startups” are completely fucked-up:
The solution (of course) is to make riding nearly-free. But “means-testing”, etc.
Again: yeah, I mock Uber/Lyft/Chariot, etc. They rob public transit of funds, while clogging the damn roads.
Peale
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: doh.
Redshift
@Earl: Quite a stretch from “how many ways tech keeps reinventing public buses” to bashing transit companies. Do you really think “public” is the only important word there, and her point is supposed to be that only government should do transit?
The tech project that got tagged with “You invented a bus” was Lyft Shuttle, because they came up with car-shares that have fixed routes, fixed stops, and set fares, and they didn’t call it a transit company, they acted like it was something new. That’s what she’s talking about.
Are there startups trying to make buses work? Genuinely interested — if I search for transit startups, all I’m coming up with are yet more ride-sharing and scooter companies.
SiubhanDuinne
@eclare:
I knew the correct answer, but never made the Simpsons connection and had no idea how the contestants came up with the answer they did!
eclare
@SiubhanDuinne: Well, on to ATL for the Braves. Hate to admit it, Siri is impressive.
Another Scott
@joel hanes: The Wayback Machine at archive.org has old snapshots of the site, so it’s probably in there.
Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to figure out how to search for content in their snapshots short of clicking through one by one.
If you know the year, it might be easier to find. Apparently it was before 2009, but that’s all I’ve been able to figure out at the moment. (I have a vague recollection of finding the thread several years ago, but it’s not coming up now.)
HTH a little. Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
eclare
@eclare: For those that did not watch the Braves-Astros game, Jose Siri is an Astros player who made his MLB debut this past September. I was not referring to the iPhone bot.
ian
In my neck of the woods, they just cut the scholarships available for college students in the education department, and slashed a bunch of teaching positions that train educators to deal with things like special needs, teaching with technology, and individualized curriculum.
We also have a public superintendent of education who is banning critical race theory (not taught in our schools) because, I shit you not, she saw some kid’s notes that had pictures of stick figures talking about Marx and revolution.
The local high school keeps getting bomb and death threats because they suspended a student (then had to transfer her to online school) for refusing to show up to school with a mask on, and she and her dad are now regulars on Fox talking about the evils of public education. (The transfer part is happening because she showed up to school while suspended, which is a big no-no for fairly self explanatory security reasons).
So education is not doing super great in my corner of the United States, which also managed to vote 70-29 Trump last election. Dog help the kids in our schools.
Arclite
And we wonder why Republicans keep getting voted in…
James E Powell
@Ohio Mom:
The question is, how can we help/convince our students to acquire more background knowledge & vocabulary?
Kay
This will be the next panic:
Massive crime wave in schools!
Why are they all picking on public schools this year, I wonder? Just a herd behavior thing? They generally completely ignore public schools, given that none of them attended them or use them.
joel hanes
@Another Scott:
Google used to be able to find it before the site rebuild.
Another Scott
@joel hanes: I think Google regularly drops stuff more than 12-13-15 years old.
E.g. searching Google for “firedoglake obama” (without the quotes) doesn’t show me anything older than 2009.
It looks like Bing only goes back to around 2013.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
phdesmond
@SiubhanDuinne:
i knew about ambrosia and also recognized the Simpsons allusion. :-)
delk
Speaking of start ups and education , biotech start up Theranos ripped off 100 million from Betsy DeVos.
Redshift
@joel hanes:
This is the closest I can come, which indicates that on October 7, 2009, it was going to go into the lexicon as soon as WordPress started behaving. So it’s probably from sometime in 2009, though as others have noted, Google doesn’t seem to go back that far. You can laboriously left-arrow through posts from that point, and you might get to the original post where it appears before you run out of patience (which I ran out of after about ten posts.)
dmsilev
@delk: The phrase ‘root for injuries’ comes to mind for some reason.
JanieM
@joel hanes: Not the original in context, but this is at least a date marker.
West of the Rockies
Totally OT… every time I hear the call letters for Philadelphia’s WHYY, I hear W-H- Why, Why?!?
Anyone else?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
Speaking of which, you might be interested to hear this good news, Kay. A few dozen nuts have been bleating at my school district’s board meetings against masks, since my district adopted a mandatory masking policy for students, going about their “parental rights”, to make it make “sense” for them.
There’s even an anti-vaxx, anti-mask (but it’s ok as long as it’s a choice!) carpetbagger running for the Board who sends his kids to the district, but AFAIK lives outside of it in bumfuck nowhere. Tries to pass himself off as moderate who’s standing up for freedom, accountability, transparency, and thinks kids in the 21st century should be taught such skills as running a cash register, counting change, and learning cursive lol
He’s a union plumber and thinks trades and the military should be promoted as alternative paths for students instead of higher education. He’s being backed by the local county GOP and endorsed by the excretable Jane Timkin.
The dude’s really anti-“CRT”, doesn’t want kids going to college because he doesn’t want them to think for themselves, and is a radical, as far as I’m concerned. Anybody backed by the GOP is these days.
The good news is that pro-mask and pro-vaccine parents organized and can count hundreds of members. They showed up at this month’s meeting and swamped the anti-maskers : )
Ohio Mom
@James E Powell:That’s the dividing line between the children of higher socio-economic groups who get “enriched” and those who don’t.
The “enriched” kids get taken to Young People’s Concerts and science museums, their families travel, and they get lessons — music, swimming, tennis, the list goes on — and also get sent to every sort of specialized summer camps — computer camps, farm day camps, art camps — you get the picture.
This country has less of an education problem and more of a poverty problem. Almost a quarter of our children are poor. Solve that (ha!) and educational attainment will follow.
eclare
@Ohio Mom: That’s why the Child Tax Credit is so important. Without a fucking work requirement
And that is all I will say, it is too late in the evening for a full-on rage attack.
JanieM
@joel hanes: And here’s Davis X Machina making that comment at Obsidian Wings 9/4/2008.
(If the link doesn’t work quite right, it’s the first comment of the thread.)
HumboldtBlue
@West of the Rockies:
Because why not?
Dan B
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Notify The Simpsons. There’s an episode here. Homer dreams of bringing donuts to the ancient Greeks after Lisa informs him they had no donuts.
I’m sure there are more plots waiting. Maybe Homer can baffle Homer!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Dan B:
The writing team for the Simpsons could certainly use the help these days
Elizabelle
@JanieM: The most prescient comment on that thread, from October 2009:
JGabriel:
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Elizabelle:
Very prescient. Haven’t seen that nym in awhile
Peale
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I had that guidance counselor. When I went in to see him each year, and gave him my plans, he would go into the spiel about how there was no money for college and that the armed services were the way to go. The exact same things the armed services recruiters told me when they came to my door. Like they must have been paying him a bounty or something. If my father hasn’t attended college, I probably would have enlisted, since I wasn’t hearing any alternatives.
im sure he’s interested then investing in the type of votech Ed that would give the students a chance to score highly on the aptitude tests the forces give. And would really be there to counsel the kids on what they needed to do to actually take advantage of their time in the service. Prepare them to navigate through. maybe the army is really looking for scribes, so the penmanship would get them posted to a path away from the infantry. Important work, being a scribe. My great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great x 20 grandfather was one for Cyrus the Great.
Chetan Murthy
@Peale: Geez, that’s horrendous. Though, to be fair, 30yr ago in my hometown, it wasn’t much different. The boys got trained for the oil patch as roughnecks, and the girls, for waitress jobs until they got married and started popping out babies.
West of the Rockies
@HumboldtBlue:
Are there any other Jackals in your neck of the woods? I do a fair bit of ocean kayaking (more in Mendocino County), but I’d be pleased to down a cold one and grab lunch and solve the world’s problems with you and anyone else in the area.
Dan B
@Kay: Does Occam’s Razor lead us to a RWNJ group promoting an astro turf campaign. The internet makes it easier to conceal these campaigns from the public and the media. There are instances when they make obvious mistakes like having identical professionally printed signs.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Dan B:
Sometimes I think the internet was a mistake
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Peale:
Hah! The guy’s a willing GOP stooge, so I’m guessing not.
What steams me is he’s a union member and he’s colluding with Republicans to get elected. He’s a scab!
Dan B
@phdesmond: Did you know about persimmons, cheese, dates, walnuts?
I try to forget about ambrosia because of the horrid “salad” served on T-day and X-mas. My grandparents who studied Greek and read the classics in the original language must have bitten their tongues when served this abomination.
eclare
@Dan B: I grew up with ambrosia salad at every event at my maternal Grandma’s house. I find it disgusting, up there with tomato aspic, which is basically tomato Jell-O served with a dollop of Mayo.
Redshift
@JanieM:
Ah! That’s why it didn’t turn up. I think I even knew that at one time.
Kattails
@Peale: hate to tell you this, but if you are good at calligraphy nowadays, you can make upwards of 60K a year between logo design, wedding invitations, and other custom work. Beats the hell out of retail sales jobs if you’re good at the business end.
cain
@The Oracle of Solace:
The stupid part of this is that almost everyone is anti-corporatism but since they are also all about being part of a team they vote for pro-corporatism.
Redshift
@Dan B:
Yep. There’s a lot of that in Northern Virginia, because unfortunately a lot of national GOP operatives live here, like the ones behind the recall attempts of school board members. It’s distressing how easily reporters fall for whatever “concerned parents group” someone claims to belong to, without doing the minimal digging to reveal that the only documented members of this “group” are actually with various wingnut organizations, and it’s not grassroots at all.
Elizabelle
@Redshift: Lovely to see you here.
What make you of the Virginia governor’s race? I am hopeful that Youngkin just shot himself in the foot with the “Beloved” dustup.
Did you see Glenn Kessler’s article today? The “child’s” younger brother (Michael) is infamous for attempting to invite Donald Trump Jr. to speak at the U of Florida for a $50,000 fee. He was student body president, and nearly got impeached over it. LOL.
And now: to shoot the other foot: the WaPost this evening:
I see from the WaPost that we can expect an army of GOP “poll watchers.” Watch away — Virginia runs clean elections.
Wondering if the Dems will start recruiting more observers for each precinct. Pretty much to observe the opposing observers. Le sigh.
Fake Irishman
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ex high school xc runner here. Everything you say here is true.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Redshift:
I’m inclined to think they’re not falling for it, but their editors want them write their articles as if they are
Redshift
@Kay:
I suspect it’s because the astroturf CRT rage-fests got them lots of coverage taking it seriously, despite the fact that the guy who instigated it openly admitted he made it up so people could project onto it whatever they didn’t like that was related to race, and get outraged and activated. They were also primed for it because of last year’s “open the schools now!” bullshit, which conservatives were obviously intending to make a campaign issue, but it fell flat because it was obviously insane.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Elizabelle:
Huh. Geminid was speculating that Youngkin was paying off Trump to not appear. Hopefully that helps out McAufflie if it’s true
Kattails
Open thread, just wanted to say that here in New England it’s a lovely night, cool but above freezing. The moon was just rising due East, in a bit of atmospheric halo. South of that I caught my first glimpse of Orion just rolling up over the treetops. Utterly peaceful. Minimal light pollution, some Milky Way but we’re just clearing after three days rain. October here is absolutely its own time, unmistakable, I love it. Five and a half cords of firewood stacked and under cover. Picked the last of the beans 3 days ago and the tiny Japanese eggplants and bitty zucchini. Off to bed, love y’all.
Elizabelle
@Redshift: Glenn Kessler took a howitzer to the Murphy family today. The “concerned mother” with the snowflake AP student and Beloved. It was a thing of beauty, and all the more unexpected for being Kessler.
Hunting for it now.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Elizabelle:
That “concerned mother” bit must be a standardized talking point in conservative circles because Jane Timkin, an ex-head of the Ohio GOP and US Senate hopeful, used the exact same wording in an article I saw today
Elizabelle
From the Kessler article. The Michael story was the coup de grace.
Glenn Youngkin’s viral ‘child’ ad is missing important context
“Glenn Youngkin — he listens. … Join me in voting for Glenn Youngkin.”
Here’s where Murphy vouches for Youngkin. But she’s not a disinterested party. Her family is well-connected politically and active on behalf of Republicans. Her husband, Daniel R. Murphy, is corporate counsel at the powerhouse lobbying firm BGR Group and an active backer of Republican politicians from across the county. Federal Election Commission records show more than 280 contributions by Dan and Laura Murphy (mostly Dan) over the last 10 years.
Both Dan and Laura contributed $5,600 each in 2019 to the Trump Victory Committee and $5,600 each (the maximum) to President Donald Trump’s 2019 campaign. Dan also contributed $2,000 to Youngkin’s campaign, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
Blake, the former high-schooler, was a summer intern in the Trump White House and is now associate general counsel at the National Republican Congressional Committee. (His LinkedIn page appears to have disappeared from the Web after the ad posted.) Another son, Michael, was the subject of a failed impeachment drive when, as University of Florida student body president, he invited Donald Trump Jr. to give a speech in exchange for a $50,000 fee.
Elizabelle
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Just put up the WaPost article, but it’s in moderation. Too many links in the original text by Kessler, I think.
I laughed so loud that the snowflake’s younger brother almost got impeached as U Florida student body president for trying to spend $50,000 of student funds to have Trump Jr. come speak.
People who live in glass houses. … shouldn’t pretend to be “concerned moms.”
Here it is. Worth the click.
Redshift
@Elizabelle:
I try to stay in “what will be will be” mode while I’m doing as much as I can to help make good things happen. I both believe that most of the people confidently talking about the horserace and “momentum” know nothing (like all pundits), but on the other side my natural inclination is toward optimism, so I’m usually better off if I try to temper that, too.
Overall, I feel like our candidates are running solid campaigns, and turnout seems to be good. Youngkin seems to have jumped around between campaign themes (“I’ll cut your taxes! And I’ll increase spending on schools!), which doesn’t seem to me to indicate confidence. But as I said, I’m prone to optimism.
JWR
Did anyone else suffer through tonight’s CBS Evening News? Norah O’Donnell opened a segment about the ongoing negotiations surrounding the BBB bill by saying, and I quote: “With Democrats in disarray…”. Ugh! Our media have become such bizarro parodies of themselves. (Yeah, I know. They’ve been that way for a very long time, but geez…) And I’m sorry, but Norah O’Donnell’s resting “haughty Witch” face is just too much.
Redshift
@Elizabelle:
Any time Republicans have “an army of poll watchers” they tend to tell them to challenge anyone who doesn’t “look like” a legitimate voter, and you know what that means. “Watching” is always intimidation. Not worried in my area, since the poll workers are good and the Dems always have plenty of election protection lawyers available, but it could be trouble in smaller places.
I read they’re also “alarmed” about “unguarded” drop boxes and are having people “guard” those, too. (In reality, drop boxes are required to either have a person or a security camera on them.) Again, I’d be happy for them to waste their time if I thought they could refrain from intimidating.
Elizabelle
@JWR: That is Noron of whom you speak.
@Redshift: Prone to optimism gets a lot more done. Good for you for knocking all those doors.
Redshift
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Absolutely. They describe themselves as “mothers” to make themselves more sympathetic and make people more wary of challenging their BS.
Elizabelle
@Redshift: A jackal this morning suggested that “parents’ rights” are the new “states’ rights.”
Yep.
Redshift
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Apparently there was a Democratic PAC that ran ads just in the media market around Mar-a-Lago asking “Why doesn’t Youngkin want Donald Trump to campaign with him?”
McAuliffe has certainly been fundraising heavily off the possible Orangemandias campaign event.
Random note: I was watching a great lecture series about the Celts recently, and apparently the name McAuliffe is a product of the Viking era (which wasn’t all raiding and invasion) and means “son of Olaf”!
JWR
@Elizabelle: Ha ha! Memories of FDL, when Jane Hamsher held a contest for most fitting nicknames for our media betters. (I think “Noron” won out.)
JWR
I happened across the Thom Hartmann show earlier today, and he did the best Bob Costa interview I’ve yet to hear, (especially the part here, at the 7 minute mark), about James Clyburn, Joe Manchin and the filibuster.
NotMax
Closed captioning needs to check its meds tonight. Lesser (by a country mile) movie out of poverty row, moments ago:
Dialogue: “That’s an asinine thing to do.”
CC: “That’s a mathematician thing to do.”
:)
Chris T.
I know that the point of vouchers or whatever is the grift thing, but I do wonder: what if we really did make the formula “school S nominally has N kids; if K are moved from S to some other school, school S gets the money they would have gotten for the N kids, minus the K voucher amounts … and the voucher amount is $2” for instance. So the school that would have 1k kids and get $1k per kid, still gets $1M, minus say $20 for ten “rich kids” whose parents put them in private school. So this school now has $1M (minus $20) to spread over 990 kids. Does that help school S?
That is, is there any formulation where this idea works? (I know the reality is going to be that S is going to get at best $900k instead of $1M-minus-$20. I’m just wondering whether there’s even a shred of what one might call theoretical honesty in any of this.)
Chris T.
@NotMax: You mean mathematicians aren’t asinine?
opiejeanne
@Dan B: I’m pretty sure the anti-mask protests at school board meetings are mostly astro-turf operations. People on Twitter have spotted some of the same protesters at more than one venue, some have been identified as people with no children, no children in the district, not living in the district, and even from out of state.
Today we sat down with our ballots, and there was a trio of these idiots running for our local school board, but it took us a while to figure it out. They targeted the 3 incumbents, and it took some careful reading to work out what they were really saying. They used “science based” and “CDC guidelines” in their argument that the schools should have been reopened earlier. Neither was a true reading. After we dropped off our ballots, I found the ad for these three people in our mailbox, and we were right. Then, Dale Fonk, the failed Republican state senate candidate for our district sent us a letter endorsing them. Sometimes, figuring out who the good guys are on the ballot is a major chore.
opiejeanne
@Dan B: I have vague memories of eating ambrosia salad long ago, picking out the fruit and leaving most of the dressing, and being scolded and referred to as a picky eater.
Yeah, maybe. Or maybe that stuff wasn’t all that great.
Jay
@opiejeanne:
Try the Jay Salad instead,
1/2 spinach and mixed salad greens, ( assorted weeds from the garden)
Soft chevere cheese, flaked
1 cup salted, shelled pistachios
2 diced, ripe mangos
2 diced sweet red peppers
Raspberry or blackberry vinaigrette dressing.
oatler
https://jezebel.com/facebook-employees-ripped-sheryl-sandberg-over-exec-hos-1847936161
satby
@JanieM: What a great trip down memory lane! Thanks for finding that, lots of familiar names who used to comment here too.
JWR
Yesterday afternoon’s Background Briefing was most excellent.
I’ve only listened to the second interview, and wow, Joe Manchin’s constituents are gonna be so mad!
Eh, you thought!
satby
@JWR: Heather Cox Richardson also mentioned that op-ed letter in her post for today on Letters From an American. I’d like to think it will matter, but I don’t think pundits and opinion writers have the influence they used to have. Even a formerly “respected” (by them) conservative pundit is quickly discarded if they stray from the tribal ideology. The mob is ruling them, and they’re afraid of their own supporters.
Raven
I love it when threads go up late at night about something I actually know something about. Oh well.
schrodingers_cat
@MisterForkbeard: He is a Republican in “progressive” clothing.
joel hanes
@JanieM:
Ah. Thanks for doing the work.
I was reading ObWi then; it was the best.
I so miss hilzoy’s voice as a long-form blogger; her twitter feed is not a replacement.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
@NotMax: It seems to be more “approximate captioning” than “close”.
Ramalama
Marcy Wheeler / Emptywheel has been keeping track of the educational levels of the 500-600 contestants of the Jan 6: Are you a Terrorist or Tourist game show. Not all judges do this, but many ask defendants what grade level they were at when they finished school. She noticed that only maybe a handful of people had graduated college. 1 has a grad degree. Most were high schoolers.
Ruckus
@Redshift:
One of the problems of public transit is where they go, how easy it is to ride and how long it takes to get end to end and carrying your stuff back if shopping is your goal. And yes I know this because I use public transit in LA – a lot. It’s not nearly as bad as it sounds but it’s also slower generally than driving, even in LA. And it also rarely takes you where you need to go. I go across LA county to the VA. At minimum it takes me a train, a subway, another train and a bus. Total time, almost 2 hr. By car, off peak, takes 1 hr, during peak takes 2 hr. Or longer. Public transit is cheaper than driving, for a geezer.
sab
@MisterForkbeard: He is not a moron. He is evil and deceitful. There’s a lot of money to be made attacking Democrats. The right wing field is crowded now, so he is coming from the alleged Left. Really he is no different than Megan McCardle.
frosty
@Ruckus: Whatever you’re doing still beats the RTD circa 1969! Which is how I got to LAX from Claremont n