Friday Open Thread | This is your Secretary of Education, People…..Ignorant as can be….

Posted on March 3, 2017 by rikyrah

DeVos sparks controversy with comments on black colleges

Some experts on historically black institutions panned her statement as ignorant, while others said she was inadvertently praising segregation.

By Benjamin Wermund

02/28/17 12:01 PM EST

Updated 02/28/17 03:30 PM EST

President Donald Trump’s efforts to bolster relations with historically black colleges erupted in controversy Tuesday after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released a statement equating the history of the schools — founded during an era of racial segregation — to “school choice” policies.

“HBCUs are real pioneers when it comes to school choice,” DeVos said in the statement, released Monday night in advance of Trump’s planned signing of an executive order giving the schools more clout. “They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality. Their success has shown that more options help students flourish.”

The executive order, which Trump signed Tuesday afternoon, was supposed be an easy bit of outreach on the final day of Black History Month to the black community that soundly rejected Trump on Election Day. It moves a federal initiative focused on the colleges from the Education Department to the White House — a move the schools had asked for, hoping it will give them better access to the president.

But the goodwill was quickly overshadowed by DeVos’ statement, which came on the heels of a Monday meeting between Trump and presidents of the schools that left some dissatisfied. Some experts on historically black institutions panned the statement as ignorant, while others said she was inadvertently praising segregation…

…………………..

… DeVos also seemed to reject one thing the schools are really hoping to get from the administration: More money. One school president told POLITICO that the colleges had asked the White House to back a $25 billion investment in infrastructure improvements on their campuses in their meeting with DeVos Monday. They also advocated for year-round Pell grants and to maintain or increase funding that goes to schools that serve low-income students.

“Rather than focus solely on funding, we must be willing to make the tangible, structural reforms that will allow students to reach their full potential,” DeVos said in her statement…

 

Sigh…….

This unqualified woman is the Secretary of Education. Her only qualifications for the job is that she’s a big time Republican Donor.

That’s it.

HBCU’s part of ‘School Choice’?

GET.THE.PHUCK.OUT.OF.HERE.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities are a direct result of the Institutionalized Racism of this country.

Instead of welcoming former slaves as equal partners in this enterprise called America, post Civil War, this country decided to create American Apartheid – known as Jim Crow.

Blacks – no matter how smart, were forbidden. Were not allowed. Could not even apply to the colleges in this country. You could count on one hand, the number of White Schools that admitted Black students. And, if they did, they only admitted 2 or 3. Period.

Blacks, if they were going to get an education, were going to have to set up their own schools, which is what happened. There was nothing ‘ CHOICE’ about it.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities came about because Black minds needed educating too, and the larger society was not interested in doing that in the least.

That is the beginning of her insult.

The injury comes when she purses her lips about they shouldn’t expect any money coming this Administration.

These schools have been systematically underfunded, with states and the federal government, giving more public education dollars to White schools.

Money helps those other schools, so why not spend money towards HBCU’s.

The entire thing this week was a photo-op, with a meaningless Executive Order, in a meeting with ignorant people who have absolutely no interest in improving the situation for HBCU’s.

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59 Responses to Friday Open Thread | This is your Secretary of Education, People…..Ignorant as can be….

  1. Ametia says:
    March 3, 2017 at 6:25 pm

    ‘Rikyrah, you going to see this movie?

    Logan’: A Bloody, Haunting Goodbye to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine

    You can’t really blame Wolverine for giving up on his own story. The gruff, adamantium-boned superhero endured nearly 200 years of grueling physical and emotional pain—not to mention a cinematic dud or three—before Logan, James Mangold’s devastatingly lovely swan song for the character. By the time it begins in 2029, the world’s already gone to hell. The X-Men’s war against persecution is lost. Mutantkind is all but extinct. And everyone Logan’s ever loved, save for a fast-deteriorating Charles Xavier (Sir Patrick Stewart) is gone.

    His wounds don’t heal like they used to; his face has grown worn and tired; old scars and fresh blood crisscross his chest, but he barely cares. Hidden away in a lonely part of the north Mexican desert with Charles and their mutant-sensing friend Caliban (Stephen Merchant), Logan has neither the will to live nor the motivation to die. He’s a failure in his own eyes, and a real “disappointment” in Charles’s.

    And yet, Logan, Hugh Jackman’s ninth and final outing as the Wolverine, is really a profoundly hopeful film. It loves and deeply understands its characters and the fraught, familial relationships between them. Its action scenes—brutal, bloody, and thrillingly inventive in a way comic book beat-em-ups rarely are—are as character-driven and impactful as its story. (Like, really impactful: You feel each punch, stab and dismemberment. Bless that R-rating.) This is a Western that happens to star superheroes; a road movie grounded in quiet, tender moments. It’s an elegy, wholly unconcerned with franchise-building or connecting distant universes. And with the introduction of Laura, a young mutant with powers similar to Wolverine’s, it becomes a portrait of makeshift families, empathy, and finding normalcy, too. That’s what the best X-Men stories are usually about. Turns out no one knows this better than her.

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/03/in-logan-hugh-jackman-s-wolverine-battles-a-trump-esque-deportation-force.html?via=newsletter&source=DDAfternoon

    Reply
  2. Ametia says:
    March 3, 2017 at 6:22 pm
    Reply
  3. rikyrah says:
    March 3, 2017 at 4:14 pm

    Happenings at the State Department

    This week began with reports that President Donald Trump’s budget proposal will drastically slash the State Department’s funding, and last week ended with White House adviser and former Breitbart head Stephen Bannon telling
    the attendees of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference
    that what he and the new president were after was a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” At the State Department, which employs nearly 70,000 people around the world, that deconstruction is already well
    underway.

    In the last week, I’ve spoken with a dozen current and recently
    departed State Department employees, all of whom asked for anonymity
    either because they were not authorized to speak to the press and feared
    retribution by an administration on the prowl for leakers, or did not
    want to burn their former colleagues. None of these sources were
    political appointees. Rather, they were career foreign service officers
    or career civil servants, most of whom have served both Republican and
    Democratic administrations—and many of whom do not know each other. They
    painted a picture of a State Department adrift and listless.

    Sometimes, the deconstruction of the administrative state is quite
    literal. After about two dozen career staff on the seventh floor—the
    State Department’s equivalent of a C suite—were told to find other jobs,
    some with just 12 hours’ notice, construction teams came in over
    President’s Day weekend and began rebuilding the office space for a new
    team and a new concept of how State’s nerve center would function. (This
    concept hasn’t been shared with most of the people who are still
    there.) The space on Mahogany Row, the line of wood-paneled offices
    including that of the secretary of state, is now a mysterious
    construction zone behind blue tarp…

    A lot of this, the employee said, is because there is now a “much
    smaller decision circle.” And many State staffers are surprised to find
    themselves on the outside. “They really want to blow this place up,”
    said the mid-level State Department officer. “I don’t think this
    administration thinks the State Department needs to exist. They think
    Jared [Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law] can do everything. It’s reminiscent
    of the developing countries where I’ve served. The family rules
    everything, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knows nothing.”…

    But while senior State appointees have yet to be appointed, other
    staff has been showing up. The Office of Policy Planning, created by
    George Kennan after World War II, is now filled not just with Ph.D.s, as
    it once was, but with fresh college graduates and a malpractice
    attorney from New Jersey whose sole foreign-policy credential seems to be that she was born in Hungary.

    Tillerson’s chief of staff is not his own, but is, according to the Washington Post, a Trump transition alum named Margaret Peterlin. “Tillerson is surrounded by a bunch of rather mysterious Trumpistas,” said the senior State official who recently left. “How the hell is he supposed to do his job when even his right hand is not his own person?”

    One State Department employee told me that Peterlin has instructed staff that all communications with Tillerson have to go through her, and even scolded someone for answering a question Tillerson asked directly, in a meeting…

    Reply
    • Lonnie Starr says:
      March 5, 2017 at 9:45 am

      They can wreck these institutions but… for lack of information they’re going to make big mistakes. Without information they’re going to be played by foreign powers and entrepreneurs, in ignorance they will make bad deals that have the opposite of the effect they intended.

      Next will come the questions, as people look for answers as to why such bad choices were being made. It will come back to these institutions being mauled. From there it’s going to be a very bumpy ride indeed as other things begin breaking down with no hope of replacement or repair.

      Reply
  5. rikyrah says:
    March 3, 2017 at 4:07 pm

    One of the reasons for the articles trying to explain the deplorables is 2520’s aren’t used to being judged as a group. They always fight back with the ‘ rugged individual’. But, in this case, naw, nobody’s buying it. ALL you mofos are suspect – period. ALL of you brought this hell to us, and nobody’s playing with you and doesn’t give shyt about ‘ understanding’ you.

    Reply
  12. rikyrah says:
    March 3, 2017 at 3:41 pm

    MarketWatch‏Verified account @MarketWatch

    Foreign travelers spend $250 billion a year in the U.S., but fear may be ruining America’s biggest export industry.

    Reply
  17. rikyrah says:
    March 3, 2017 at 3:22 pm

    Trump slashes Great Lakes funding by 97 percent in early budget plan
    March 03, 2017 at 9:59 AM

    The White House is proposing to slash Environmental Protection Agency funding that pays for Great Lakes pollution cleanup by 97 percent, according to a budget document obtained by the National Association of Clean Air Agencies.

    The potential cuts are part of President Donald Trump’s initial 2018 budget proposal, detailed in a U.S. Office of Management and Budget “passback” to the EPA that outlines drastic cuts to an agency Trump has called a “job killer” and promised to reduce to “tidbits” as a candidate.

    The proposal would virtually eliminate annual Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) funding, slashing it from $300 million to $10 million among other cuts that would altogether reduce the EPA’s total budget by a quarter.

    Reply
  19. rikyrah says:
    March 3, 2017 at 3:16 pm

    There are not that many coincidences in the WESTERN WORLD

    Impeach Donald Trump‏ @Impeach_D_Trump

    4 Russian diplomats named in the Steele Dossier died in the last 60 days. Every single time, Trump supporters brush it off as a coincidence.

    Reply
  21. rikyrah says:
    March 3, 2017 at 3:11 pm

    Andrea Mitchell‏Verified account @mitchellreports

    Fmr Deputy CIA Dir David Cohen on Yemen raid: It was not approved by the Obama administration. I was there, I was in all of those meetings.

    Reply
  23. rikyrah says:
    March 3, 2017 at 3:06 pm

    Audio version from WBEZ. Natalie does wonderful work.

    Black Homeownership: The Promise and The Pitfalls

    My parents, Joe and Yvonne Moore, married in 1974, and their first home decision was a cultural and practical choice: They wanted to live in an African-American community on Chicago’s South Side, put down roots and start a family.

    I later learned as an adult how thoughtful their decisions were on buying that home and a subsequent home in an integrated neighborhood. I also came to the realization that my own homebuying decision did not benefit me like my parents’ decision benefited them. It wasn’t until this story that I revealed to them the troubles that I faced owning and trying to sell a condo in the Bronzeville neighborhood.

    This is important because homeownership is one of the big staples of the American dream and a major way we build and retain wealth. Buying a house is a complicated and high-risk move, but it’s even more so if you’re black because all kinds of things are rigged against you. Race shapes the decision of what house to buy and where to buy it. It changes the way the whole system works for African-Americans.

    Neighborhood of excellence

    My dad worked for Shell Oil Company, part of the post-Civil Rights wave of African-Americans hired by corporate America. My mother was a special education teacher and administrator at Chicago Public Schools.

    When my parents bought a house, they weren’t confined to the former Black Belt on the South Side, an area to which African-Americans had been limited. But they did buy in an area that experienced white flight two decades earlier: Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood.

    “Chatham was a neighborhood of excellence,” my dad said, adding that he and his neighbors formed a block club and got to know each other.

    The home my parents chose was a brick Cape Cod on quiet, leafy South Michigan Avenue. They bought it for $30,000 — an average price for Chatham back then, though a family story has it that the owner, an elderly widow, found my father charming.

    The house had four bedrooms and a typical South Side, wood-paneled basement prone to flooding when it rained. I have good memories of that basement: An old eight track and record players were next to shelves stacked with my parents’ records, from Redd Foxx comedy to the Ohio Players to Malcolm X.

    http://interactive.wbez.org/blackhomeownership/

    Reply
    • Ametia says:
      March 3, 2017 at 2:57 pm

      GTFOH These gutless, maniacal, suit-wearing MOFOs, who pillage and rob our government blind, quoting the bible and Jesus to justify their EVIL.

      Reply
  30. rikyrah says:
    March 3, 2017 at 2:48 pm

    Daniel Dale‏Verified account @ddale8 38m
    Memphis’s mayor and police leader requested this DOJ review last year. Now halted under Trump and Sessions for reasons unknown:

    Justice Department halts federal review of Memphis Police Department
    59 minutes ago

    The U.S. Department of Justice said Friday that it has ended its federal review process of the Memphis Police Department.

    “The Department of Justice’s COPS Office will no longer proceed with the collaborative reform process with the City of Memphis and Memphis Police Department,” Justice Department officials said in a news release Friday morning.

    The DOJ said its COPS office would still provide technical assistance and training resources to MPD.

    Reply
  31. rikyrah says:
    March 3, 2017 at 2:43 pm

    WHY THE ALT-LEFT IS A PROBLEM, TOO
    Much of the media spotlight has been on the “alt-right.” But the “alt-left” provides a mirror image distortion: the same loathing of Clinton, rejection of “identity politics,” and itch for a reckoning.
    BY JAMES WOLCOTT
    MARCH 2017

    excerpt:
    The alt-right receives the meatiest share of attention in the media, as it should. It’s powerful, vicious, steeped in neo-Nazi ideology, nativist white supremacy, men’s-rights misogyny, and Ayn Rand capitalist übermensch mythos, and it heralds a conquering hero in the White House in President Donald J. Trump, while the former executive chairman of the venereally right-wing Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, functions as despot whisperer, trickling Iago-ish poison into Trump’s receptive skull.

    The alt-left can’t match that for strength, malignancy, or tentacled reach, but its dude-bros and “purity progressives” exert a powerful reality-distortion field online and foster factionalism on the lib-left. Its outlets include not only Jacobin but also the Intercept, one of whose co-founders is the inexhaustible Glenn Greenwald, lawyer, author, journalist, and crucial conduit for Edward Snowden’s stolen N.S.A. data to The Guardian; Web sites such as Truthdig, Consortiumnews, and Naked Capitalism; and anomalous apostates such as Mickey Kaus, a former contributor to liberal percolators of ideas and opinions such as Washington Monthly, the New Republic, Harper’s, and Slate, who migrated sideways and down to the right-wing Daily Caller, did a temporary hitch as a columnist for the Breitbart bughouse in 2016, and serves as a tweeting defender of Trump’s proposed wall. Other busy beavers on Twitter include Michael Tracey, Freddie deBoer, Mark Ames, Connor Kilpatrick (a Jacobin contributor), Jeremy Scahill (journalist and Intercept co-founder), and similar fun guys.

    A Tumblr site devoted to “Trumpian Leftism” captures the intellectual flavor of their temperaments. One of the alt-left’s political darlings is Tulsi Gabbard, a progressive congresswoman from Hawaii who met with then president-elect Donald Trump in Trump Tower and was rumored to be under consideration for a Cabinet position, and its quixotic preacher-man and noble leper is Cornel West, once an orator at every social-justice convocation who got so uncoiled by his rancorous contempt for Obama and cast adrift into the hazy fringes of the alt-left—see Michael Eric Dyson’s definitive autopsy, “The Ghost of Cornel West,” the New Republic, April 19, 2015—that in 2016 he supported the Green Party candidacy of Jill Stein, that stellar mind.

    Reply
  35. rikyrah says:
    March 3, 2017 at 2:33 pm

    Steve Marmel‏Verified account @Marmel

    The SCOTUS appointment should be on hold until we know which government appointed him.
    There’s a reason they’re rushing it all.
    #Resist

    Reply
  38. rikyrah says:
    March 3, 2017 at 2:26 pm

    He’s the Secretary of Exxon…the rest of this stuff doesn’t matter to him.

    Rex Tillerson skips State Department’s annual announcement on human rights, alarming advocates

    By Carol Morello March 3 at 2:29 PM

    Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who during his confirmation hearings repeatedly vowed to promote human rights as a core American value, alarmed human rights advocates when he did not appear in person to present the State Department’s annual human rights report, released Friday.

    In a break with long-standing tradition only rarely breached, Tillerson’s remarks were limited to a short written introduction to the lengthy report. Nor did any senior State Department official make on-camera comments that are typically watched around the world, including by officials in authoritarian countries where abuses are singled out in the report.

    Instead, a senior administration official talked to reporters by phone and only on the condition of anonymity.

    “The report speaks for itself,” the administration official said. “We’re very, very proud of it. The facts should really be the story here.”

    But Tillerson’s absence underscored how the former ExxonMobil executive remains more comfortable with an aloof, corporate style of governance than the public diplomacy practiced by his predecessors.

    Reply
  42. Liza says:
    March 3, 2017 at 9:12 am

    Blumenthal: Sessions needs to give ‘credible explanation’ or resign
    March 2, 2017 at 6:40 PM EST
    …

    HARI SREENIVASAN: What about the attorney general’s defense that he was answering the question that he was asked and nothing more?

    SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: Looking at the record, he was asked that question not just once, but several times during his testimony. He was asked that question not just once, but several times in writing.

    And to say that he may have misunderstood the question, when, in fact, everybody knows he had to have been prepped for that question, it was an obvious and challenging question that had to be briefed to him, and he had to go through that preparation.

    And remember also Jeff Sessions is a prosecutor, as I was United States attorney for Connecticut, the chief federal prosecutor, state attorney general of Connecticut. We know the importance of every word under oath. And so I find that explanation inadequate.
    …

    HARI SREENIVASAN: Should there be an investigation into perjury of your former colleague?

    SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: The investigation should be into any violation of law that has occurred by anyone. And it should be by a special prosecutor who will uncover the truth, so that the American people know about the cyber-attacks on this nation and know about any cooperation or complicity or support the Russians received from anybody in the United States.

    HARI SREENIVASAN: The attorney general today, along with Speaker Ryan and others, said, listen, this is part of the job as a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. They meet with ambassadors all the time.

    SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: This ambassador was from Russia at the height of the political campaign and of the Russian interference and cyber-attack on this nation, through not only hacking into the Democratic and Republican National Committees, but also the campaign propaganda and misinformation and fake news.

    So, the contacts with the ambassador in terms of timing, who it was, what country and what was going on is certainly more than just routine. I have never met with the Russian ambassador. And the meeting here is certainly more than just a passing occurrence.
    …
    http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/blumenthal-sessions-needs-give-credible-explanation-resign/

    Reply
  44. Ametia says:
    March 3, 2017 at 8:50 am
    Reply
  45. sinderhella13 says:
    March 3, 2017 at 6:57 am

    She is completely incompetent. And according to Trump, this ‘misunderstanding’ is just a distraction. BAH! It’s so frustrating!! Thank you for your post!

    Reply
  46. rikyrah says:
    March 3, 2017 at 1:53 am

    Good Morning, Everyone 😐😐😐

    Reply

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