Does this mean there are ~60 year olds taking student loans, or that there are ~60 year olds that still haven’t paid off 40 year old college loans?
Probably the latter. If you have a loan and earn below a threshold you can defer paying the loan. Depending if it is a Federal subsidized or federal unsubsidized loan , the gov will pay the interest, or not , when it is deferred.
In that case, I have less sympathy.
You shouldn’t. People take out the loans before they enter the workforce. I paid my loans, but it took decades and they were a huge burden, and mine were at a much lower interest rate than most.
From what I read in state code, a candidate for office (I assume sheriff is an elected office) must be eligible to vote. He can petition the court to restore his right to vote, and it is not clear whether a court could deny his petition.
I was talking to my neighbor the other day and he speculated that The Orange Asshole (or one of his rotten kids) had applied to Harvard and was rejected, thus his ongoing war with the institution.
Makes a lot of sense, actually.
Trump doesn’t give a shit about his kids.
Maybe Ivanka somewhat, that’s it.
Maybe not, but he would take any rejection of them as a personal slight against him (everything is ultimately about him, remember?). And he can’t abide that at all.
I guess I could buy that.
I’m thinking Melania had an affair with a Harvard-educated Mexican liberal who imports African art from Lesotho.
I think it’s no more complicated than:
Obama went to Harvard.
&
MAGA folk can never infiltrate and break universities (and their power) the way they csn government. So they attack the Ivy League, and double down on the one resisting.
The foreign student visa issue is just like the tariffs: the uncertainty does as much damage as any actual consequences. The Brain Drain has begun, and this US academia is weakened. (Destroying public sector science also seems like it’s more about destroying the academic power base than anything else.)
Likely parents who cosigned student loans for their children, I’d think.
That was my guess last week.
Yes. Education and critical thinking skills are like holy water to MAGA. They can’t abide by any institution that encourages and enables such things. So they have to attack them.
When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, they eliminated about 90% of schools. Education was considered an enemy to them.
The communist regimes in Russia and later China (which was inspired by Russia) took over education and any dissidents were dealt with harshly.
In Nazi Germany, they forced educators to put a new emphasis on sports, history, and “racial science” above all else, and of course made certain that all education was in support of the Nazi regime and ideology.
This is what authoritarians do. They see a takeover and attack on education as essential to their success and very survival. It’s like taking out a weed at the root. The Trump administration is just following the classical tyranny playbook.
They might not be able to infiltrate universities (though not for want of trying), but they absolutely can break them. Freeze Pell grants and federal work-study, and a lot of smaller universities like mine are simply screwed. I think prioritizing big shiny objects like Harvard and Columbia was a tactical error on their part (those schools not only have huge endowments, but they probably could fill next year’s entire freshman class with students willing and able to pay full freight if they absolutely had to), but there is still plenty of time for them to rectify that error.
Yes, that was my point. They can’t break them from within à la DOGE so they must find another way, which they are absolutely doing.
David Cay Johnson (a long-time Trump observer and biographer) had an observation about secondary education and critical thinking in the US the other day:
Jamie Raskin, Tim Snyder and David Cay Johnston on Trump’s dangerous authoritarian dictatorship.
[Edited slightly by me from the YouTube audio transcript for clarity]
America is a country now where half of adults read at the level of a fifth grade child and more than a fifth, around 22%, read at the level of an 8-year-old–a third grader. So people who don’t have reading skills, don’t have critical thinking skills, can be easily manipulated and they have been, and there’s plenty of surveys showing that. For example, journalism students at Northwestern University put this together, in those counties in America with no newspaper–there are 3,300 counties in America and hundreds of them now have no newspaper–Trump’s margin of victory was in the neighborhood of 80 to more than 90%. People don’t consume news and they just rely on the PR pitches that they’re getting. Then you end up with a result like this, which is a very grave danger to our republic. We may not as a democracy survive Donald Trump’s return.
Johnson also had an anecdote about there being high schools where the teacher will just show the students movies instead of having them read the novels that they’re adapted from. He makes the point that when you read a novel you have to engage your imagination to visualize scenes and characters in the world you’re reading about; when you watch a movie, it’s mostly spoon-fed to you in comparison.
Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of people who get their news spoon-fed to them by Fox, OAN, RW social media, etc and have never learned to critically analyze what they’re being told.
Not a whole lot to it. Basically, Trump is afraid of Republicans ‘jumping ship’ to run for higher offices (Senate or governorships); ‘Trump will try to prevent as many House Republicans as possible from leaving to run for Senate or their state’s governorship.’ Trump wants to spend ‘gobs more money’ (Ha! I was going to post ‘gobs of money’ before I saw they used ‘gobs’ in the article!) to stress the importance of keeping the House in Republican hands.
I wish I could believe it’s a good sign, but I think it’s nothing more than a sign of Trump’s paranoia. Dictators always have that kind of paranoia (much of it justified, admittedly). But it’s not necessarily a sign that it’s going to come to pass.
Trump seemed terrified that he was going to go to jail and that didn’t happen. He’s terrified of a lot of consequences that he ends up avoiding. I’m not going to look to Trump as a reliable indicator of what’s going to happen. It’s just an indicator of what Trump is afraid might happen.
As I said, I’d love to see it as likely. And heck, just knowing Trump is distressed is a nice thing.
Speaking of pardons and bribes…
Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner
(NY times gift link)
From the article:
A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there “is not a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the rich.
Ha, that’s what you think!