#Education Secretary

[onlytiktoks]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/us/politics/linda-mcmahon-education-secretary-trump.html

[toyotabedzrock]

Trump Pick Linda McMahon Is Facing Her Own Sex Scandal

Trump Pick Linda McMahon Is Facing Her Own Sex Scandal https://www.thedailybeast.com/linda-mcmahon-tapped-for-trumps-education-secretary-faces-own-sex-scandal/

[colddeadfingerpeeler]

WWE loves Trump. These are the fans that love to be entertained by fakers. It's not real wrestling, and the fans look strikingly similar to those bozos paid to stand behind Trump at his rallies. Don't expect the rallies to stop, because we all know Donald can't govern, so he campaigns instead.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

Yes that, Linda McMahon.

[reality-detective]

President Trump has selected Karoline Leavitt as the next White House Press Secretary.

Excellent choice. She’s tough, fair, and knows how to keep the dishonest press in check. 🤔

[canisalbus]

I just recently started following you so i don't have the full lore of your murderous gay religiously traumatized doggos, BUT, from my understanding, they are Italian and i don't know what part of Italy they are from, yet i can't help headcanoning Vasco as Tuscan, while Machete is probably from some part of Veneto. And as an Italian who has heard Tuscans and Veneto dialet, well it's an hilarious mental image.

Vasco is indeed Tuscan, Florentine to be specific. He comes from a wealthy and influential noble family that has lived in Florence for centuries. He's proud of his roots, and it's usually easy for strangers to tell where he's from. He's a resonably successful politician and has worked as an ambassador and representative of Florence on numerous occasions.

Machete is originally Sicilian (ironically about as far from Veneto as possible), although he was taken to mainland at young age and has lived in several places since then, before ending up in Rome. The way I see it, he exhibits very little local color, his demeanor and (even though Italian hadn't become a standardized language yet) way of speaking are formal, neutral and scarcely give away any hints about his personal history, at least in the 16th century canon.

[lady-raziel]

'West Wing' creator spins scenario to save Democrats: Nominate Mitt Romney to stop 'dangerous imbecile' Trump (msn.com)

As much as this is not going to happen I absolutely love Aaron Sorkin's, the creator of one of the most successful political tv shows of all time, desire to write political fanfiction with reality. A man after my own heart

Love the idea of the classic narrative arc where the big bad from a previous season joins the other side in a redemption plotline to take down the BIG big bad but with Mitt Romney

please include this in the anime reboot of the west wing

[annagxx]

I've my CSEET exam tomorrow and my mood is 'excited, anxious and Jo hoga dekha jayega'.

[wildmansters]

If anyone is still undecided on voting or like, not going to do it at all, remember that it's not just one person you're voting for or against, it's all the people they surround themselves with that you don't get a direct vote for. So if voting AGAINST Trump isn't enough, consider it also a vote against the Steve Bannons and the Betsy Devoses, and the Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. (To jog your memory, Tillerson was an Exxon CEO who is only second to fucking Henry Kissinger to "Americans who have interacted the most with Putin").

I would enumerate the people in Biden's cabinet in the same way but they have all been generally benign people that don't become household names from how awful they are. Did you know that less than half of Biden's cabinet are straight white men? If nothing else I can vote for a presidential cabinet made up of a diverse group of people.

And don't forget that a president's cabinet also becomes the line of succession and, given how old the candidates are, is likely to become VERY relevant.

[tomorrowusa]

Matt Gaetz, the MAGA Meryn Trant, is now out of the running for US Attorney General. Not that Pam Bondi is much better in terms of policy.

But Gaetz was not exactly the only problematic Trump nominee for office.

Trump has stated that he wishes to abolish the Department of Education. Perhaps to facilitate this, he's nominated a totally unqualified individual who looked the other way when 13 to 15 year old boys were being sexually exploited.

A recent lawsuit alleges Linda McMahon, who President-elect Donald Trump tapped to lead the Department of Education, knowingly enabled the sexual exploitation of children by a World Wrestling Entertainment(WWE) employee as early as the 1980s — allegations she denies. McMahon is the former CEO of the WWE, which she co-founded with her husband, Vince. As head of the WWE, Linda McMahon oversaw its transformation from a wrestling entertainment company into a publicly traded media empire. She stepped down in 2009 to run for Senate, but shelost in Connecticut in 2010 and 2012. As McMahon — who co-chairs Trump’s transition team — vies to be confirmed as Education secretary, a recent lawsuit raises questions about her care for children’s safety at the WWE. The suit alleges McMahon, her husband, the WWE and TKO Group Holdings, the league’s parent company, knowingly allowedemployeeMelvin Phillips Jr. to use his position as ringside announcer to sexually exploit children. The filingalleges Phillips would recruit children to work as “Ring Boys,” helping him set up and take down wrestling rings at WWE events. However, the job was a guise for sexually exploiting the children, which Phillips would do even in front of wrestlers and executives in the locker area, the lawsuit alleges. He also would often film his sexual abuse, according to the filing. The suit was filed in October in Baltimore County, Maryland, on behalf of five John Does, who say they were ages 13 to 15 when Phillips met and recruited them to work as “Ring Boys.” Each of them say they suffered mental and emotional abuse as a result of the alleged abuse.

These allegations are not exactly new.

Phillips’ alleged abuse at the WWE was reported by the New York Post as early as 1992. “It was common knowledge in the WWE — among the ring crew, wrestlers, and executives — that Phillips surrounded himself with a posse of underaged Ring Boys, including when he traveled across state lines and stayed in hotel rooms with the children,” the lawsuit alleges. The McMahons fired Phillips in 1988 after allegations about him sexually exploiting children continued to surface, according to the lawsuit. They “rehired him six weeks later on the condition that he ‘steer clear from kids,’” but he continued sexually exploiting young boys with the McMahons’ knowledge, the lawsuit alleges. “After decades of suffering in silence from their childhood trauma, these survivors come forward now to hold Defendants accountable for their conduct in allowing the systemic and pervasive abuse by Philips,” the lawsuit alleges.

The McMahons are rather typical Trump friends.

Allegations of sex trafficking and abuse have followed Vince McMahon for some time. In 2023, Vince McMahon paid a multimillion-dollar settlement to a former employee who accused him of rape, and he stepped down this year as executive chairman of TK Holdings following allegations of sexual assault and trafficking. He has denied the allegations. Most recently, Vince McMahon is a subject in a federal criminal investigation and a separate lawsuit in federal court in Connecticut. That lawsuit was put on hold this summer until early December. A criminal investigation around McMahon also exists in New York, though it doesn’t carry legal risk for Linda McMahon, who left the WWE over a decade ago, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation.

[chromatophorium]

Just found this charity, it's awesome. (They also give other free mobility aids) Putting this here on my blog to remember it, so that I can donate when I have the means to do so, or wish for my birthday/christmas present to be a donation. Sharing too now.

(I wish that during my education to become a orthotics and prosthetics technician they'd showed us this too. Sure, it's not the methods of production used in the country I live in currently, we use other more expensive materials and methods as a standard. But the use of other materials and methods in other countries is important information! For many reasons, which I am too tired to list now. But yeah.)

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

🤦

[dadsinsuits]

Miguel Cardona

[critical-skeptic]

Dancing Through Dystopia: Smug Smiles and Dollar Fields

The normalization of mediocrity in high office, epitomized by Trump 2.0’s cabinet appointments, is a symptom of a society lulled into apathy. It’s almost as if the electorate has been trolled into a collective shrug, watching the nation’s leadership devolve into a reality show. What’s worse is the deliberate design of this decay, exemplified by Donald Trump’s partnership with his new significant other, aptly dubbed as Elania Trump, a power couple built to mock democracy with its every move.

Take the appointment of WWE mogul Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education—or worse, Elon Musk as the potential czar of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (yes, really). This isn’t just absurd; it’s strategic absurdity. Trump and his administration are crafting a system so laughably dysfunctional that it deadens the public’s ability to react. Musk’s reputation as a “disruptor” may have earned him a cult following, but his qualifications to handle government bureaucracy are as solid as a wet paper bag. His penchant for trolling, whether online or in the boardroom, aligns perfectly with Trump’s modus operandi: turn governance into a spectacle and watch as outrage cycles burn themselves out.

This is trolling on a national scale. Trump 2.0, backed by his new cohort of yes-men and internet darlings, understands that the best way to paralyze opposition is through an endless stream of outrageous appointments. By the time you’re done wrapping your head around the first wave of them, someone else equally laughable is shoved into a position of power. This tactic ensures that outrage fatigue sets in before anyone can effectively organize against this systemic collapse of competence.

The sheer irony here is that the same people who fume over the use of words like “retarded” are silent—or worse, complicit—when actual governmental retardation happens before their eyes. Trump and his allies are fully aware that performative outrage is easy to spark but even easier to manipulate. By engineering one ludicrous appointment after another, they exploit society’s focus on language and superficial moral victories, ensuring the real damage—like the dismantling of public education and governance—occurs in plain sight.

The public’s acceptance of these appointments is a chilling indicator of how far the bar has fallen. When someone like Musk, who has spent more time managing former Twitter—now X tantrums than engaging in public service, is heralded as a “visionary,” you know the con is working. The appointment of such figures isn't just a joke; it’s an erosion of the very idea of expertise, replacing it with meme culture as policy.

This normalization isn’t just apathy; it’s complicity. It’s the willful acceptance of trolling as governance and chaos as the new normal. The more absurd the appointee, the more power Trump and “Elania” wield by turning governance into a nihilistic farce. The endgame is clear: to render the public so jaded, so disillusioned, that the most unqualified, incompetent, and unhinged individuals can slip into power with little more than a collective shrug.

In the face of this, silence isn’t neutrality—it’s surrender. The question is whether society will continue to feeding the trolls by allowing them to get under their collective skin, distracted by little petulant moves of social manipulation, control the corporate media cycles by buying into their outrage bait or finally wake up to the joke being played on them and fight for whatever is left of sanity and democracy?

[songofwizardry]

i have some real bad news for Gavin about who exactly makes up the membership of a teaching union.

anyway. in case you needed more reasons to—support the NEU teachers' strikes!