Miss Mia Sopaipilla is content to serve the nation in a less-visible capacity.
The Democrats’ best choices for president? Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren, says the editorial board of The New York Times.
“Good on ’em,” replies Miss Mia Sopaipilla. “I will nominate myself for this sunny spot by the foot of the bed.”
Tags: 2020 presidential election, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Miss Mia Sopaipilla
Mad Blog Media 
January 20, 2020 at 7:36 am |
Its kinda like the NYT can’t decide if it wants vanilla or vanilla with green green chile topping. I read it and thought it was well written, but being the boneheaded Sicilian I am, will take their advice with a large sack of salt. So far, none of the frontrunners have impressed me too much other than the fact that they are all preferable to Orange Clown.
January 20, 2020 at 8:03 am |
It’s gonna be a slog. Another of those no-choice choices.
Everything I read says Bernie has the Youngs, and Biden has the African-Americans. I’m guessing Warren has the Wonks, and Klobuchar might have the Rust Belters. Mayor Pete seems like the consultant you’d hire to recruit a candidate for president. Steyer and Bloomberg have the money.
The hard part, as per usual, is gonna be keeping disappointed factions in the herd.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got socks for Christmas again. So pull ’em up and get your ass to the polling place.”
Also, if we can get a sane person in the Oval Office, we need to back him/her up with a Congress that doesn’t look like the primate house at some tank-town zoo.
January 20, 2020 at 8:12 am |
Word.
Liz has some good ideas (actually quite a few) but my reticence is that in this day and age, I trust Uncle Sam with less and less authorities since nothing is done for its own good but for the poitical overprint.
As NPR pointed out this morning, she likely would have the power to forgive all those student loans, including those taken out by people who can haul their own freight. At my expense. I busted my own ass to pay back my own loans while paying Honolulu rents and mortgage costs. Something just grates me about that. Its bad enough that I have to pay for our lunatic excursions into the Middle East. Now I get to pay for Little Johnny’s Dumb College Decisions as well?
If the GOP wasn’t ten times more f^^ked up than the Democrats…
January 20, 2020 at 1:46 pm |
If you’re playing “life ain’t fair” and the contestants are 22 year old Khal vs whatever we’re calling college kids these days, then I get your point.
But a different frame of reference is college kids vs big banks, and that produces a different set of public policy priorities.
Nine years into raising two special needs kids, after five years or so of fostering, I have a different perspective on stuff folks do before their prefrontal cortex is finished developing. Which is why you’d better not vote for me. My first executive order: mandatory conscription of everyone over 55.
January 20, 2020 at 2:35 pm
Oh, I made my own mistakes and paid for them, taking out loans and working too many hours to support my tuition and vices, all of which led to bad grades. My Dept. Chair ridiculed me at graduation by saying I was a triple major: Frisbee, Genesee Beer, and Geology. Of course that was a challenge, too: straighten up and fly right.
I could have gotten off a lot easier if, when I quit NROTC and gave up the free ride, I went to a state school. NYS had some damn good ones. But I was, as you suggest, still developing my prefrontal cortex. First couple years of grad school were sheer hell making up for my shitty undergrad performance.
In my ideal world, states would go back to funding most of their state university and trade school costs (later made into community colleges) so we could drop instate tuition back to a point where its a small fraction of the total, i.e., enough so students have skin in the game but not enough that they are getting skinned alive. And, students would have to keep grades up to qualify. Get a 4.0 and the semester is free. Then its pro-rated so bozos like 20 year old Khal have to pay more.
My wife taught at a CC for twenty years and when we left Honolulu for BombTown, she was running its remedial programs and teaching Freshman English. She joked that the students paid less for a CC class than for a pair of good sneakers and they treated the two with commensurate value. That is, until they went out in the real world and got tired of the “ding, fries ready” gig. The returning students were dead serious.
Its complicated, so I have a hard time with simple minded political proposals. Free Federal dollars will seem like a good idea until its badly managed by states that see free money. Someone has to pay for all that stuff and they should get their money’s worth.
January 20, 2020 at 4:48 pm
Sorry, being conscripted once was enough for me. Next time I am going North, and it ain’t to Alaska. And, if we quit wasting trillions of dollars on corporate subsidies and wars, which in the last 50 years have been just another form of corporate subsidy, then we would have enough to pay for tuition free CC and state universities. Would some of the free tuition be wasted? Sure, but nobody gets killed in the process. Point being that the money is there; we pay enough taxes. It just being spent on the wrong shit by paid for politicians. And the 1% get the lion’s share of it.
Now about 2020, you know what the Professor says. And, the donks have not learned their lesson. So, unless the sociopath in chief really fucks up in the next year, BOHICA.
January 20, 2020 at 7:09 pm
Unca Sammy had his crack at me, but he wussed out. He’da kept the lottery going one more year, he mighta got my faux hippie ass. And I’d probably still be in Long Binh Jail, the onliest dude in the U.S. Army who needed 48 years to finish a one-year tour in Vietnam.
January 20, 2020 at 1:21 pm |
Steyer and Bloomsie have the money, but they have about $400M less than they started with. Cannot believe either thinks that’s money well spent.
January 20, 2020 at 8:47 am |
Maybe, just maybe, Little Johnny learned something and is less likely to fuck up the planet further. I would rather pay for that than this other shit. Not saying he learned something but he could have learned something. He might have learned something. Now applying that knowledge…..
January 20, 2020 at 9:13 am |
There is no means test. Not of income, wealth, or whether Little Johnny even learned to tie his shoes or do something tangible in return for the favor.
When I signed a promissory note, I thought that it conveyed something about a promise. Now if Liz puts this in the context of something like national service and/or a means, test, I’m on board. We need teachers and doctors in New Mexico. Plenty of reservations and low income areas that need help. You want forgiveness? Put both oars in the water. It beats having Appalachia vote for Orange Turd because they don’t see a good option.
I never joined the Free Stuff Party.
January 20, 2020 at 9:20 am |
We did this for the big investment bankers/con artists in 2008 and we didn’t get a single tangible reform worth wiping one’s bottom with. I would have preferred that we took all those who were guilty of robbing the Wall Street till and lined them up against a wall….
The only good reason I see for forgiveness is that some of these students were hoodwinked (Trump University, etc) but that goes for anyone who writes a check for a bottle of snake oil. I’m just not sure where to draw the line. If you took out a massive loan to go to Hahvard instead of a state university, gee, tough shit. Let each case plead itself.
January 20, 2020 at 9:35 am |
Means testing and whatnot aside, I’m not comfortable with the executive having this kind of authority. It’s a matter for Congress. They’ve surrendered far too much power to the White House over the decades. Kevin Drum has some thoughts on the matter.
January 20, 2020 at 10:11 am |
It would undoubtedly be a legal shitfest. Plus, I suppose an indignant Congress could threaten to block funding the Dept. of Education as retaliation. Another opinion here.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2020/01/18/can-elizabeth-warren-really-forgive-student-loan-debt/#523dcd025b6b
January 20, 2020 at 11:50 am |
Ho, ho. They went to Texas Ted, the Gucci Shitkicker, for their riposte on this one? He’s jest fine with GOP dictators.
January 20, 2020 at 2:06 pm |
I’m always leery of “fairness” arguments. Life ain’t fair, and then you die. It ain’t fair that I didn’t hump a ruck in the Ia Drang Valley, or work the coal mines without a respirator, or march with Pickett at G-burg. Next generation always has it better, except for when they don’t.
My concern with the free college plans is that the colleges will dig in just like the insurance companies did when universal health care was a twinkle in the Heritage Foundation’s eye. At some point, you’ll get what you paid for with free college for all. And there are strong arguments that a lot of college can be replaced with single focus programs, like coding boot camps and tech internships. A 4 year state degree ain’t going to produce the coding monkeys that Richard Branson needs for his intergalactic sex yachts. Elon Musk doesn’t care if you took six credits of PE, one art history class, and a foreign language when he’s looking for carbon based life forms to inhabit the pods generating wattage to recharge his Mars shuttles. The last thing education needs in 2020 is to cement in the infrastructure that got us where we are today.
January 20, 2020 at 1:32 pm |
I’d love for the USA to be a place where education and healthcare are taken care of by income (and other) taxes so everyone has access to both while the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to fund the F-35 project.
But you know what my wife says….so instead we moved somewhere that’s pretty much like that. The Open Arms rescue ship is docked here BTW.
January 20, 2020 at 2:07 pm |
That will be $3.5B for that bran muffin, please.
January 20, 2020 at 2:47 pm |
Indeed. I worked for sixteen years in the LANL Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Building, which was built in the fifties and is really long in the tooth. The replacement full on nuclear facility, CMR-R, was originally supposed to cost a few hundred million bucks. By the time the smoke cleared, it was up to about ten billion (with a b) and climbing and then was cancelled due to costs. Between the delays, the changes in design, and the insistence that it could be built to withstand a direct hit from a K-T Boundary sized asteroid, it got too expensive to build. Maybe that was good news, I suppose.
http://northmesamutts.blogspot.com/2010/04/cmr-r-in-one-thousand-years.html
January 21, 2020 at 3:13 am |
At least someone had the sense to cancel that vs the F-35 fiasco. I’ll never understand the politicians who vote for these insane projects with the excuse they employ their constituents and pulling-the-plug would put folks out of work. Like we couldn’t spend the tax revenue on education, healthcare, infrastructure INSTEAD? Why is building weapons-of-war such a noble f–king cause?
January 21, 2020 at 5:31 am
Because of stock prices. What, me work?
January 21, 2020 at 6:55 am
Political bribes, er, I mean campaign cash from fat cats in the military industrial complex?
In New Mexico, seems everyone on the Left seems to hate nukes but both Udall and Heinrich campaign on bringing home the bacon, i.e., pit manufacturing. Our delegation was screaming and bitching because DoE wants to split pit manufacturing between here and Savannah River. Of course that whole SRS thing is a massive cluster bleep.
And I hear we are putting another supercarrier in the water. How long before someone figures out how to efficiently sink one of those multibillion dollar targets?
January 21, 2020 at 8:23 am |
They will come up with a way to sink those carriers much faster than they come up with a way to dispose of 35 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste in 43 underground tanks, as of June 2018, at SRS. I think we have had this discussion about this before. When someone can explain to me how to safely handle and dispose of radioactive waste, I don’t want to hear about more nuclear power, including nuclear powered aircraft carriers. Logisticians call it life cycle management, and it is routinely ignored by decision makers who want quick results, especially politicians. I grew up near the Zion nuclear plant, and I used to drive through the SRS on my way to South Georgia and Florida to bass fish. And yea, I don’t need a flashlight to go to the bathroom at night. Must be from eating those fish out of the Savannah river and Lake Michigan.
January 21, 2020 at 9:29 am
I considered a dissertation on safe disposal of fission products and some actinides but my advisor didn’t want to get involved in that gig. It would have been more expensive than simply putting it in glass and digging a bigger hole, so no one wants to spend the money. Still, I’d wager its easier to put radwaste away safely than to put all that CO2 back in the ground. Life cycle management means you have to get your arms around the whole problem rather than just the easy parts.
January 21, 2020 at 8:36 am |
I spent 9 figures on the Grizzly/Wolverine project. Never heard of it? That’s my point.
January 21, 2020 at 11:09 am
I was on the Source Selection Board for the Mobile Subscriber Equipment system after TRI-TAC program manager failed to deliver. The military procurement system has been broke for a long time. The only competent procurement offices I saw in the DoD when I was active in it, were at the NSA.
January 22, 2020 at 10:43 am |
Bummerama.