Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Lighten up, Francis.

How has Obama failed you today?

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail.

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

This blog will pay for itself.

This is how realignments happen…

Not all heroes wear capes.

We still have time to mess this up!

The Math Demands It!

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

This is a big f—–g deal.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Wetsuit optional.

Nevertheless, she persisted

Also, too.

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Shocking, but not surprising.

I personally stopped the public option…

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Education

Wednesday Evening Open Thread: In Its Way, Quite Educational!

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GO FORTH TO DIE, YOUNG GLADIATORS! WE NEED THE ENTERTAINMENT!

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Late Night Open Thread: Trump’s Malign Pandemic Neglect Kills College Football; GOP Complains Indignantly About the Corpse

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Bad News for the GOP, Good News for the Rest of Us

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Standard demurral: Better informed front pagers (Hi, Tom!) will no doubt write about this later, but seriously, it’s good news for the students, for the American universities that serve those students, and for the very concept of FREEDOM that the opponents of these students claim to support…

BOSTON (AP) — Facing eight federal lawsuits and opposition from hundreds of universities, the Trump administration on Tuesday rescinded a rule that would have required international students to transfer or leave the country if their schools held classes entirely online because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision was announced at the start of a hearing in a federal lawsuit in Boston brought by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs said federal immigration authorities agreed to pull the July 6 directive and “return to the status quo.”

A lawyer representing the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said only that the judge’s characterization was correct.

The announcement brings relief to thousands of foreign students who had been at risk of being deported from the country, along with hundreds of universities that were scrambling to reassess their plans for the fall in light of the policy. With the policy rescinded, ICE will revert to a directive from March that suspended typical limits around online education for foreign students…

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Elsewhere, the same day…

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GOP Death Cult Open Thread: Sorry, But Schools Are *Not* Gonna Be Ready to Reopen

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In the first place, during a normal year, many schools would be reopening sometime in August, just a few weeks from now.

In the second place, even in a non-pandemic season, getting the infrastructure ready to do so takes more time than that.

In the third place, the GOP’s Dear Leader can demand schools open up, and no doubt some of his death cultists governors will do their best to schedule some kind of official reopening… but no parent with any other options is going to send their kid(s) off to a plague pit just because it would make the Oval Office Occupant’s marketing campaign look better. And those unfortunate or misguided parents who do send their kids back will inevitably spark new coronavirus hotspots, for the teachers and school staff and relatives if not the kids themselves. Even schools in functional democracies, like South Korea and Denmark, have run into problems despite rigorous efforts. And that’s assuming that enough teachers & staff are willing or desperate enough to play ‘rona roulette in the first place.

You’d think someone in the Republican administration would step up to explain these basics, but I guess the Trump Purge has advanced to the point where even those individuals whose careers are most at risk can’t even muster that much of an effort.

Absolutely, kids need to be in school! And parents need the ‘free child care’ that too many Americans assume is the only reason for public schools to exist, too. But this ain’t a tv show, and firmly announcing Make It So! at the imaginary machinery behind the stage sets isn’t gonna make it happen.

Authentic Heartland(tm) gobbledygook, from the Emergency Backup Dear Leader. It’s a death cult, all the way down.

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‘Blue tsunami,’ she says…

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With the usual preamble about counting chickens, hatchery, etc., this advisory from the Cook Political Report is amaze-balls:*

This election is looking more like a Democratic tsunami than simply a Blue wave. President Trump, mired in some of the lowest job approval ratings of his presidency, is trailing Biden by significant margins in key battleground states like Pennsylvania (8 points), Michigan (9 points), and Wisconsin (9 points). He’s even running behind Biden in his firewall states of Florida and North Carolina.

We’ve made changes to our Electoral College ratings to reflect this reality.

  • Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska’s 2nd district move from Toss Up to Lean Democrat.
  • Maine, once in Lean Democrat, moves to the safer Likely Democratic category.
  • Georgia has joined Arizona, North Carolina and Florida in the Toss Up column, although, at this point, Biden would be slightly favored to win at least Arizona and Florida.
  • Maine’s 2nd district has moved from Likely Republican to a more competitive Lean Republican.

These moves alone push Biden over the 270 electoral vote threshold (to 279).

Georgia a toss up? Jeebus, Mary and Joseph! And Trump has negative coattails too!

Republican strategists we’ve spoken with this week think Trump is close to the point of no return. A couple of others wondered if Trump had reached his “Katrina” moment: a permanent loss of trust and faith of the majority of voters.

In talking with strategists on both sides this last week, it’s also clear that Trump is dragging Republican congressional candidates with him as well.

Speaking of the no-coattailed orange carbuncle, his concern for America’s children is touching:

It’s July. Schools open NEXT MONTH, and the CDC just issued guidelines, which Trump will now bully them into abandoning.

The school situation is serious. But speaking of “permanent loss of trust and faith,” we all know Trump wants to open schools (and on the cheap!) so they can function as daycare centers to goose parental productivity. He thinks if he can resurrect the economy from the smoking crater left by the massive impact of his pandemic mismanagement, he’ll have a chance in November. That’s what this is all about, period. And governors like DeSantis will follow him right off a goddamn cliff.

Open thread.

H/T: Valued commenter Marcopolo

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Excellent Read: The *Real* Lord(s) of the Flies

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I’d read Kipling’s Stalky & Co. some years before we were assigned Lord of the Flies in the eighth grade, so I took it as further proof that the British public-school system was designed to turn callow teenagers into mature sociopaths. Never found it believable that anybody other than overwrought English teachers would mistake Golding’s nasty fantasy for anything more than torture porn, but apparently such people still walk among us. Rutger Bregman’s report in the Guardian is a lovely corrective:

… The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were six boys – Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa [Tonga]. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand.

There was only one obstacle. None of them owned a boat, so they decided to “borrow” one from Mr Taniela Uhila, a fisherman they all disliked. The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. Two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner were all the supplies they packed. It didn’t occur to any of them to bring a map, let alone a compass.

No one noticed the small craft leaving the harbour that evening. Skies were fair; only a mild breeze ruffled the calm sea. But that night the boys made a grave error. They fell asleep. A few hours later they awoke to water crashing down over their heads. It was dark. They hoisted the sail, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Next to break was the rudder. “We drifted for eight days,” Mano told me. “Without food. Without water.” The boys tried catching fish. They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out coconut shells and shared it equally between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.

Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year…

They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).

They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen’s perfectly healed leg. But this wasn’t the end of the boys’ little adventure, because, when they arrived back in Nuku‘alofa police boarded Peter’s boat, arrested the boys and threw them in jail. Mr Taniela Uhila, whose sailing boat the boys had “borrowed” 15 months earlier, was still furious, and he’d decided to press charges…

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Open Thread: Absolutely Unsanctioned Online Instruction Tips

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