True. I wonder who is the most famous American I currently know almost nothing about. (I guess we should not count entertainers, with age-group and genre divisions). Obviously I can’t know the answer…but I could think of someone I became aware of, and discovered they were already quite famous, and a lot of Americans knew pretty well over a long time.
Let’s see…it would probably have to be a mega-preacher or something. (Joel Osment, maybe?). (Arguably, these are entertainers). Or one of Oprah’s quacky doctor friends. (Have most people been pretty familiar with this Oz guy for a long time?). Oh — I know — that video gamer who just died (but were many folks older than 30 aware of him?). Something like that.
I’d consider myself a medium-information voter, and in the Midwest (so not a lot of Trump news back in the day). I knew that he had declared bankruptcy more than once, but that he had also bounced back (kind of necessary if you are going to go bankrupt multiple times).
Then he got The Apprentice, which really pushed the ‘business genius’ idea. Of course, as a left-leaning medium info guy, once he started his real run in 2015/2016 I did some research and found out that not only was he not a business genius but also a dick.
I heard of him as “stupid low-class rich guy” back in the 1980s, when he and Bill the Cat swapped brains. I didn’t learn that he wasn’t actually rich until he became politically active.
Hey, remember back when we thought that Bill the Cat for president was a joke?
12-year-old me never forgave him for that stupid board game. Ever been stuck at a friend’s house on a rainy day with nothing to do in the late 80s/early 90s? You go raiding the house for games. And inevitably you don’t find good board games; you find Trump: The Board Game.
Oh, and he was that NY guy that had a toupee that resembled a dead animal. Except it turns out it wasn’t a toupee; that’s actually what his hair looked like. That was something new I learned after 2016.
It was probably the “lovely parting gift” for losers on The Apprentice!
I think I knew someone took out an ad about the Central Park Five, but I didn’t know it was trump.
One thing I did not know was how utterly BAD trump was as a businessman. I mean, he lost money in casinos! Is that even possible? But I didn’t know before 2016. And I definitely didn’t know what a horrible, shallow, childish senile idiot he was.
NYers have a bias that they are the center of the universe, and we all should know everything that happens there, and it shows up in threads like this. We out in what is known as “the rest of the world” can’t tell and don’t care to tell one rich NY real estate millionaire from another.
OK. I’m trying to wrap my head around this. From the link -
“More than 20 Republican attorneys general including Texas’ Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Tuesday against President Joe Biden’s administration over a Department of Agriculture school meal program that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”
Why we even need such a program that prohibits discrimination is stunning. But they are suing the Biden Administration for not allowing discrimination?
Umm. What?
Do these people have ABSOLUTLY NOTHING TO DO AT ALL?
I got some discrimination for you guys, right here. Stupid assholes.
Their prime directive is to spread the hate, and try to hurt other people. That’s it. That’s the sum total of their platform, and their voters love them for it.
It’s not that I don’t believe Ken Paxton and other transphobic conservatives could be cruel and irrational enough to deliberately deny school lunches to trans students just for being trans: I’m sure they easily could. But after reading your link, I don’t think that’s what’s actually going on with this suit.
The issue seems to be that the USDA, which oversees federally funded school lunch programs, has decided to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity as a violation of Title IX. Because schools receiving federal funds have implicitly agreed to follow federal civil rights regulations, a school that doesn’t accommodate gay and transgender students in bathroom facilities and sports participation, for example, ends up being in violation of Title IX.
Your linked article says that “it is not clear whether the federal government would hold back funding for school meal programs as part of its enforcement”, but presumably that’s what the AGs in question are worried about.
Which, y’know, is definitely just another instance of conservatives aggressively seeking legal freedom to be shitty and discriminatory to trans people, which means that it’s a day ending in “y”. But it does not in fact involve any Republicans deliberately and specifically seeking to deny school lunches to trans students.
What it involves is Republicans deliberately and specifically seeking to deny trans students the right to school bathroom use, sports participation etc. based on their gender identity, and not wanting to lose school-lunch-program funding as a result of their shitty discriminatory behavior.
It all goes back to the sports thing, I think. My reading of the article was not that anyone is trying to deny trans students access to school lunch programs, not even in Texas.
It says that the federal government may stop funding the school lunch programs in states that allow/require discriminating against trans students in any way……which, in practicality, means it’s geared towards discrimination in the athletic programs.
