President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I agree with you. And this is not to minimize the joke of the people Trump has gotten to run most of the government agencies.

At the same time, the Department of Education is ridiculously unnecessary (it didn't even exist until 1979) -- in terms of actual public education at the local level -- and it has been a giant, inefficient boondoggle of 10s of billions of dollars a year. So I could give two craps who is running it, and if she is going to do anything to scale back its influence it would be fine by me -- if she could somehow keep her mouth shut and not be offensive.

At the same time, the conflict for someone like me is two fold: 1) She is a moron. For example, when she said that historically black colleges were pioneers of "choice." It was offensive, showed a clueless lack of any historical context, and that alone should disqualify her. And then there is that whole "choice" thing. I have no problem with charter schools as a concept if some can figure out a financial model to make one work. But where people like her take it is just more of the "swamp" their rhetoric says they are there to clean up. We inefficiently blow through a staggering amount of money (and we are running massive debt to do things like this) that gets handed out corruptly by the Department of Education. Obviously, that has done little by way of tangible "results" in educational accomplishment over the years. But that is even beside the point. The Democrats have their preferred groups that they want to grease with all of that money -- the labor unions, for example, are a big beneficiary, buying votes via Pell Grants are another -- at the expense of others who are on the hook for all of that bad debt. People like Devos have their preferred groups -- those privately run charter schools, which has become an industry I can only compare to the privately run prisons that created a country that is corruptly handing out money to keep more people than anywhere in the world imprisoned.

Either way, I just see corruption and waste and digging holes deeper. What Trump did was appoint: 1) absolute dolts, such as her, Rick Perry, Ben Carson, Ryan Zinke, etc. to run these agencies. 2) It was passive aggressive, because they all have expressed their desire to do away with the very agencies they are running. If that is your goal, then MAKE IT your goal. Don't play games with it. 3) On top of it, the stories over the last few weeks, show just how out of touch each of the people I named is. The expensive furniture Ben Carson's wife was buying at HUD to remodel. The $150,000 doors Zinke had them buy for his office. It's just more of when Tom Price was chartering jets around the world for him and his wife (as our debt runs up) before he got the heave ho. So that leaves us with a passive aggressive structure, being run by people who seem clueless, and are bringing the usual level of corruption to DC -- as we dig ourselves in deeper into what is going to be a fiscal crisis. It's just lovely.