Smelly Patterns, Weird Parallels, and coffee

1. Cuts to student loan programs, Pell Grants, and now college savings funds....I smell another "Education President". I smell intensification of the middle class kibosh. I smell making education (you know, where all those liberal elites are happily cocooned in universities poisioning our young people with, gasp!, facts and critical thinking skills from professors who distinguish between facts and their own interpretations of those facts... oh my!) smaller in order to foster the culture of death (henceforth: CoD).

2. Bush is The Decider. Osama isStill In Charge. Which is just one more of a number of parallels between these two, besides their zealotry, ideological blindness to realtiy or ethics, and general Jack-ass-ness.

2 a. I bought the C-Span DVD of the press's annual roast of the president with Stephen Colbert. I have no cable service (tired of being sold shit all the time), and a slow internet connection, so that was my option. Also I wanted the historical document, so that when I'm teaching 20 years from now, and a students asks me why everything's such an unholy mess, I can play Colbert for them, and all will be clear. I was thrilled with S's performance. Loved his powering through of the uncomfortable silence resulting from Colbert sucking all the air out of the room. The man is my new hero. Truth to power, with wicked satire in the bargain. Here, here!

But, the parallel is this: have y'all noticed that Bush is starting to look A LOT like Pat Robertson? Anybody? Image is closely monitored at these levels of power, as it is in high school, and something about this new resemblance smells.

Plus, Surely a Bush-bin Laden-Robertson combo is the unholy trinity of all my childhood nightmares.

3. Conservatives are starting to sound like socialists. This from Fox News on TIRPA:

Thanks to TIPRA, gaming the kiddie tax is O-V-E-R. The new law extends the kiddie tax rules until the child reaches age 18. Only then will a minor pay tax solely based on her/his own income tax bracket. Furthermore, this change is retroactive to January 1st.

John Battaglia, tax director of Deloitte’s Private Client Advisors Practice, sums it up this way: “Because you’re under the age of 18, if your investment income exceeds $1,700 this year, you’re going to get taxed on amounts above that at your parents’ rate. You’ll lose the benefit of the lower dividend and capital gains rates” on this excess investment income.

Huh? The Reps don't want people using legal loopholes to avoid paying taxes to The Big Bad Fed???? Really? And they don't want people holding "excess investment income".... for education. So, right, right, I forgot, we don't want regular folks holding excess investment income, only our dear friends in the gated communities and on Martha's Vinyard. Gotcha. OK.

Here's a bit that helps, a little, explain smart ways to handle college savings funds from The Post-Gazzette and David Clements of the WSJ.

And this bit about Oprah, sorry to bring this up again, but, geez Jack-ie, you sound like a socialist too:

"No one person should have that kind of power to affect markets, politics or anything else," says Debbie Schlussel, a lawyer, conservative columnist and blogger.

Anyone? Class? The intellectual trouble here is this: once a language is sufficiently corrupted by usage that fails to respect referents, signifieds, established concepts, accuracy, there is no way, no way kids, to get back from there. This Admin. and their ad-minions are the most pernicious kinds of post-structuralists, playing in language deconstructively. Not to jam axiological thinking that allows the anhilation of whole peoples, not to explore the near-mystical web of connotation that is a language, noooooooo. To knock the real, the referent, the signified out of the game and thus establish dominion over interpretation, the wholesale ownership of meaning and discourse, and to make damn sure that anyone who wants to use language to further sincere, principled, ethical agendas, which need clear and un-deconstructed uses of language (see Rorty, liberal ironist, problems with), can't get a toe-hold in the minds of the people who can't afford college anymore and thus never learned to tell the difference between ironic and non-ironic discourse.

Bastards. Ass-souls. Jack-asses. Feh. Stop with the hell-thoughts already. It's not helping.