Valerie Strauss writes about Omarosa’s new book “Unhinged” and what she says about Betsy DeVos.
“A new book about President Trump by one of his former senior advisers, Omarosa Manigault Newman, claims that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wants “to replace public education with for-profit schools” and that Trump has called her by the nickname “Ditzy DeVos….”
“Manigault Newman writes:
“Her plan, in a nutshell, is to replace public education with for-profit schools. She believes it would be better for students, but the truth is, it’s about profit. She’s so fixated on her agenda, she can’t give any consideration to building our public schools, providing financing for them, particularly their infrastructure needs.
“Manigault Newman writes that she accompanied DeVos on a trip to Florida in 2017 and that DeVos was booed while giving a graduation speech at Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college in Florida. Graduating students heckled DeVos in large part because a few months earlier, she had called historically black colleges and universities — which were created because blacks couldn’t attend white schools — “pioneers” of school choice.
“Manigault Newman writes that after the speech, she asked the secretary how she thought she did. DeVos responded, according to the book, by saying she thought she did “great,” and then is quoted as having said the students at the Bethune-Cookman graduation “don’t have the capacity to understand what we’re trying to accomplish.” Manigault Newman then wrote this: “Meaning, all those black students were too stupid to understand her agenda.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Expected. Bitsey’s look-a- like, a thin, aging, blonde junior-leaguer type of woman, who never worked a day in her life, Elizabeth S. Nalty, adds anther face to privatization. Nalty chairs the Schleider Education Foundation. Douglas Harris of Tulane, a participant in the $10 mil. Dept. of Ed. product development and marketing plan for the charter school industry, is the Schleider Foundation Chair in Public Education. Also expected, Harris raked in $4.3 mil. in grants from John Arnold/Smith Richardson/ William T. Grant and other money from Gates and Lumina.
Here’s the icing- Nalty is on the Ethics Review Board for the City of New Orleans. No shame Republicans and DINOS. ( N.O. mayor, Landrieu, was with the investment bankers of Third Way, last month when they plotted to defeat progressives.)
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Sadly it will play well in Iowa… and every out-state red state region where he’s lying to and cheating the farmers and small town business owners …
She can’t nor would want to or know how to privatize small-town America schools.
She’ll hand vouchers to the suburban private and religious school families.
They will (outstate and wealthy) love her plan.
They claim they have been sending their state and federal taxes to city schools, immigrants, and (quoting a suburban taxpayer here) “those kids” for too long.
She will cater to that animosity (and fill-in-the-blank)-ism by warehousing children in schools with scripted teachers, punitive environments, and a master on the porch making a profit off kids reminiscing the ’60s (the 1860s)
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Iowa voters are smarter than you think. Here is their main newspaper’s editorial against voucher legislation proposed earlier this year: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/editorials/2018/01/31/iowa-school-choice-legislature-vouchers/1079107001/
And here is the report on its failure to get out of committee due to bipartisan opposition: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2018/02/15/republican-led-school-choice-bill-wont-advance-year-iowa-house/339461002/
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Tell us something we didn’t already know.
Betsy’s about as opaque as a piece of plate glass, which is her one good quality.
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wrinkled plate glass-
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She doesn’t understand her own agenda, as it’s a transcendental fusion of self-enrichment, self-affirmation and mission from God, not meant to be understood by mortals. It’s Trump’s church of self-enrichment, shared by quite a few. Delusion and irrationality, worthy of Maistre. As individuals, closer at hand and with lesser responsibilities (as it should ever be) we would simply call them pieces of work and largely try to ignore them. This is among the worst-case gov scenarios, rule by those nutty yet maliciously divisive, egotistic and egoistic folks we usually try to ignore, for good reason.
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Looking at her history, we have known this from the start. She wants to weaken civil rights, protect perpetrators from victims of sexual abuse, saddle students with mountains of debt and destroy public education. Her family has made a fortune scamming hard working families. She cares nothing about working class people. We are simply around to provide a revenue stream for the 1%.
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RE: “We are simply around to provide a revenue stream for the 1%.”
You got this right, retired teacher.
DeVOODOO and people like her are so GREEDY and IMMORAL.
What the deformers want is JIM CROW.
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Fortunately, intelligent, funny, imaginative people are Democrats- the real kind.
Movie titles are being reimagined for Steve Bannon and posted in tweets. My favs, “Saving Private Aryan”, “Saving Private Interests”, “The Fascist and the Furious”, “Fifty Shades of Racism” and”White Pride and Prejudice”. With hope, Bitsy will be targeted next.
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Isn’t that the reason why Eva Moskowitz worked so tirelessly when DeVos was nominated? If it wasn’t DeVos’ view on privatizing all public schools that made Eva Moskowitz demand that the Senate confirm her, then it must have been one of her other reprehensible views. Moskowitz’ over the top praise of DeVos didn’t specify what she loved the most about DeVos but Moskowitz did assure us that DeVos’ was exactly what the country needed. Moskowitz and her staff and board at Success Academy Charter Schools must be celebrating this week at seeing their dream of DeVos’ ideal country coming true.
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The Manafort judge is getting death threats because of his bias against the prosecutors. The richest 0.1% know that the small leak of pressure from time to time, e.g. Betsy’s yacht, death threats,… isn’t going to prevent the coming explosion. Academics, not in the pockets of the oligarchs, ought to start distancing themselves from those who are. Maybe they’ll be spared, unlike Chinese intellectuals, who were all lumped together.
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The Manafort judge was appointed by Reagan i.e. Republican, no surprise that he didn’t want jurors to know the lavish lifestyle that foreign bank accounts paid for. Foreign governments dropped money into Manfort’s open hands to influence American policy. The judge didn’t want Americans to know the extent of greed among Republicans. DINOS like Tony Podesto are Republicans.
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What is unhinged is anyone giving “O” any credence at all. Public schools have become so mismanaged by people with social agendas – not educating the youth but indoctrinating entire populations with their social agenda – as to have become unworkable. They started by saying that the schools were failures and have now made it so. The one, and as far as I can see only, advantage privatized schools is that they can go out of business and at no public expense.
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Quote: “The one, and as far as I can see only, advantage privatized schools is that they can go out of business and at no public expense.” End quote
Whoa, WHAT! The privatized schools that go out of “business” do so at great public expense. During their terms of service, these privatized schools drained precious funds and resources from the actual real public schools. The charter schools duplicate many of the positions and offices of the district schools, that is wasteful of limited money and resources. When these charter schools flop, it causes all kinds of chaos, turmoil and trauma for the kids, that’s an emotional and educational “expense.” Having a parallel but separate school district (a charter school), makes no sense and saddles the actual school district with extra expenses that causes the real public schools to have to make cut backs in personnel and curriculum.
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“Parallel” means elimination. The attack on vouchers (while warranted) is aimed at eliminating competition from religious schools.
The Gates/Z-berg, for-profit schools-in-a-box, will replace public funding for schools. Reed Hastings of Netflix, plots something similar.
The Paul Weyrich training manual at Theocracy Watch provides the master plan. It’s the Koch plan. Weyrich was the architect of the religious right, and founder of ALEC and the Koch’s Heritage Foundation.
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Paul Weyrich quote: “Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Thom Hartmann often plays this audio clip of this right wing pundit/vampire pontificating about reducing the ability of people to vote.
Right wingers/GOP/ libertarians/Ayn Randists hate, hate, hate democracy. They hate people voting, especially working class people. They want to limit people voting, they want to make voting very difficult.
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More on the late Paul Weyrich: Weyrich founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC),[5] an organization that trained and mobilized conservative activists, recruited conservative candidates, and raised funds for conservative causes.
The CSFC, founded by Weyrich, “became active in eastern European politics after the Cold War. Figuring prominently in this effort was Weyrich’s right-hand man, Laszlo Pasztor, a former leader of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party in Hungary, which had collaborated with Hitler’s Reich. After serving two years in prison for his Arrow Cross activities, Pasztor found his way to the United States, where he was instrumental in establishing the ethnic-outreach arm of the Republican national Committee.”[11]
The above from wikipedia. The Arrow Cross Party is a hideous group of Nazi right wing thugs very much like our KKK, white supremacists, fascists and hate mongers. It figures that Weyrich’s right-hand man would be a Nazi thug.
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Thanks for the added info., Joe
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jojo,
I don’t know of any public schools that “indoctrinate” their students. That would be the religious schools that DeVos wants to fund.
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JoJo listens to right wing talk radio or Fox.
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Who is the “they” you are talking about? I can’t tell whether you are a supporter of the public school concept. You don’t seem to be a cheerleader for charters with their only advantage being they can close without a lot of hoopla.
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Republican Rep. Brian Mast from Florida is getting death threats (someone arrested) because of his support for Trump’s policy of separating refuge children from their parents. Mast’s opponent in the primary was a Trumper “Christian” who ran against Mast on a pro-gun stance despite Mast being funded by the NRA and receiving an A+ rating from the group (that was prior to him recognizing the political wind shift after the school shooting). Crying a river for GOP politicians.
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Pitting Omarosa Manigault Newman against Donald Trump requires us to confront the question, “What do you do if 2 people with zero credibility make opposing claims?” It’s like that philosophical paradox conundrum:
“Socrates: What Plato is about to say is false.
“Plato: Socrates has just spoken the truth.”
The answer is: We can’t count on either one of them having any connection to reality at any given point; occasions on which either apparently displays such connection may be more a matter of coincidence than possession of, or intent to convey, objective fact. It’s a tossup; we’re in the same position as if neither had said anything at all.
While in this case Ms. Newman’s statements happen to be consistent with my own assessments of Mr. Trump & his administration, & therefore tempting to own, in order to rely on them as carrying any supporting authority, I must invalidate all my previous assessments of Ms. Newman, AND simultaneously decide that when Mr. Trump hired Ms. Newman for a high position on WH staff, on that single occasion out of all others, he’d actually selected a responsible, well-qualified candidate who genuinely had the public’s best interests at heart. If, in order to claim this one instance of support for my position from a WH insider, I do perform the mental & ethical gymnastics necessary to tear apart my carefully considered previous evaluations of Ms. Newman, in exchange I then expose myself to the considerable liability of Ms. Newman reverting to type, in the process taking down not only her own already shaky credibility, but also my own, having decided to tie it to hers.
It’s not worth it to me to rely on Ms. Newman’s claims here as authoritative, in order to grasp this one fleeting opportunity to say those who are on the fence about Trump, “Aha! I told you!” while accepting the risk of her making subsequent statements more in line with her previously-established character, resulting in a net loss for my position. Best to just let this drift by, as have so many other revelations expected to damage Trump, but which he ended up just cruising through. I’d rather be patient, waiting & working for more definitive justification (as if it’s needed).
With this book, Ms. Newman is attempting with the left exactly what Mr. Trump did with the right in 2016. He’d previously been, at least marginally, a Democrat. His alignment with the usurpers who called themselves the Republican Party was purely a marriage of convenience. He saw an opening to become the figurehead for an angry, motivated segment of society, & grabbed it. If there’d been such a rift & disarray in the Democrat Party, he’d have been just as happy to go with that; he represents a party of one. Ms. Newman is attempting to leverage such an opening in order to maintain her position in the public eye. Benefit any constituency derives from it is incidental, & likely to be fleeting.
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As Trump said at one of his rallies, believe nothing you read or see.
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🙂
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Actually they understood her agenda and that’s why the POS was booed.
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Trump calls Betsy “Ditzy DeVos” because he is jealous of her. She has more money, more yachts, more jets, more houses, and more bathrooms. Trump doesn’t pay attention to anything else. He appointed her to that position because she was Pence’s suggestion and Pence got his marching orders from Charles Koch.
I wonder if Ditzy DeVos has gold toilet seats in all those bathrooms.
Ditzy DeVos is a member of ALEC.
Does Trump have a yacht?
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I should have checked. Yes, Trump has a yacht. It’s called Trump Princess, a 100 million dollar superyacht.
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The DeVoses won’t loan Trump money. They’ll try to sell him Amway products.
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How much money has Ditzy DeVos donated to elected officials as campaign donations, and how do we know she didn’t make Trump an offer of several million and just transfer the money from one offshore account to another one that’s he was already using to launder Russian mob money.
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Something for his hair?
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What horrible taste his yacht exhibits. All crass and no class. Money does not buy you taste, obviously. It looks like a granite and gold quarry exploded inside the yacht, covering every surface possible.
If Medusa opened her own interior design firm, the Donald would be among her first clients, giving his yacht for her to infect.
Ick!
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Bitsy’s McMansion hell sets the standard for bad taste. It’s on Lake Macatawa. Looks like a 22,000 sq. ft. “book after it gets wet and the pages curl up”. Vox has other comments about it.
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Trump owes billions of dollars. DeVos actually is worth billions of dollars. No wonder he is jealous. He might hit her up for a loan if the Russian oligarchs turn him down.
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Maybe Ditzy DeVos bought her position with the DOE and already paid Trump off with a money transfer from one untouchable offshore account to another. I wonder what Trump’s price is?
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I’m still curious about Erik Prince’s meeting in the Seychelles that occasionally gets mentioned. Maybe Prince did some kind of dirty work for Trump’s campaign, and that’s how Ditsy got the job.
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Bitsy’s money is paying for campaign ads against Corday in Ohio.
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The state of Ohio should seize those DeVos dollars because she was fined over campaign finance violations and never paid up
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Linda: cite?
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TRUE: “Trump owes billions of dollars.” Maybe he will ask Putin and DeVos to split what he needs re: $$$$$.
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Clearly demonstrating that Betsy DeVos is a racist. Perfect fit for our current White house residents (now the “white” in White House takes on a whole new meaning.
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DeVos wanting to privatize education? I cannot and will not believe it in a million years.
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Re: Devos Priorities
Long. I think DeVos’ priorities are for federal funds to go Christian schools that she likes and then to profit seekers. If vouchers become fully embedded in federal law and the budget, as she hopes, then states are likely to be in the driver’s seat on how those funds are disbursed.
In 2017, about 7,000 private schools in twenty-six states received public funds under four major choice plans: Vouchers, Education Savings Accounts, Scholarship Tax Credits, and Special Needs Programs/Individual Tax Credits.
Of the private schools that received tax subsidies, 76% were religious schools, and 14% excluded students and staff who identify as gender non-conforming.
Florida is a head of the herd with all four of these choice plans. The plans are administered through the non-profit Step Up For Students, Inc.
Florida also has a trademarked “MyScholarshop” debit card for state-approved purchases of education services and goods. I could not find a public list of these providers. I wrote about that debit card here. https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/floridas-2018-education-savings-accounts-a-vehicle-for-a-la-carte-education/
The 2017 990 IRS form for Step Up For Students, Inc. shows that each of Florida’s choice programs has significant administrative costs, with some of these costs allocated to lobbying for legislation to tweak the programs. Six unnamed individual donors have received tax breaks for contributions ranging from a high of $150 million to $15 million.
Not to be outdone on digital payments under choice plans, the Step Up For Students website has an endorsement from the American Education Institute, quoting an AEI “research paper” titled “Education Savings Accounts: The Great Unbundling of K-12 Education.” This is really a 2017 book, not a paper, with multiple authors who are promoting the “New Frontier in School Choice” (the subtitle of the book).
In a related 2018 paper, Economists at the Brookings concluded this about education saving accounts “Our overall assessment of the likely impact …is that the … expansion to private K-12 schools will primarily benefit affluent families, produce limited incentives for promoting private school choice, and come at a nontrivial cost to states.” https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/529-reports_njproofed.pdf
While states work through various choice plans on the books and on the horizon, aided by the policies of Trump and Betsy Devos, entrpeneurs have created a different way to pay fees to providers of goods and services for the educational choice marketplace.
A major means of payment is known as ClassWallet. This is a virtual wallet, marketed as having these features: Prepaid Card with ATM and MCC Code Restrictions; White Label and Black Label Merchants for Prepaid Electronic Receipt Capture; Mobile App; Tuition Management; Fraud Dashboard; Online Marketplace of Pre-Approved Vendors & Service Providers; Pre-Approval Capabilities; Service and Product Reviews and Information Sharing; SKU Level Data on Every Transaction; Automated Reconciliation with Annotation of Charges; Automated Reimbursement Management; Actionable Data; Business Intelligence; Configurable at the User Level. (Readers will need decode this jargon).
ClassWallet is tied to six major “partners. Each will profit from fees for their services. Bank United and Central National Bank; InComm (an international payment scheme with 255,000 retail locations, with prepaid cards or no-contract payment plans online or with a mobile device); Marqeta (a VISA supported on-demand, flexible virtual card); SynapseFi (full service automated banking services); and Mastercard.
In addition to fees connected with these transaction schemes, ClassWallet includes specific vendors in the ClassWallet “marketplace.” There are sure to be price-setting schemes from the following providers of goods and services.
Abilitations, special education; ACE Educational Supplies, superstore; AKJ Education, book wholesaler; Becker’s School Supplies, early and elementary materials; BestBuy, technology; Blick Art Materials; Booksource, book wholesaler; Carson Dellosa, supplemental products; Classroom Direct, PreK-8 Supplies; ClassWallet Sourced, some discounted prices; Childcraft Early Childhood; Demco, urniture; Discount School Supply, superstore; eNasco, online superstore; Essential Skills, early lliteracy; Frey Scientific, scientific supplies; Heritage Music Press; Home Depot; HoverCam, digital document cameras; Kaplan Early Learning; Nearpod, interactive lessons., Office Depot; OfficeMax; Really Good Stuff, online teacher designed/recommended supplies; Sax Arts & Crafts; Scholastic, literacy resources; School Smart, superstore; School Specialty, superstore; SpellingVocabularyCity, game-based ELAprograms; Sportime; Teachers’ Exchange, teacher designed/recommended; Teacher Tools, superstore, West Music.
For ”Premium Users Only,” Amazon.
Teachers in Dade County Florida (greater Miami) were required to use ClassWallet. You can see that many were not happy with that payment plan or the cost of products. https://kafkateach.wordpress.com/2018/05/12/why-teachers-hate-class-wallet/
The newest marketplace on the block comes from the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. This is a marketing platform for EdTech products, together with a marketing book (published August 18) promoting EdTech as essential for real world and problem-based learning and for building social relationships K-to-postsecondary. Why? Because “Who You Know” is the path to gaining the social capital needed for success.
The products and services entering the “Who You Know” marketplace sponsored by the Clayton Christensen Institute are tagged by levels of education (elementary to post-secondary and workplace), and whether the social relationship is provided by the vendor (all inclusive) or by local users (a do-it-yourself digital platform).
Vendor-provided “social relationships” turn out to be brokered services for underemployed people and volunteers. Participants in the marketplace are sometimes portrayed as “industry experts” or “real-world” models for students whether serving as a tutor, mentor, or collaborator on a project.
I looked at 41 of the vendor-provided services for elementary students, all being touted as the key to acquiring the social capital needed for success. None discussed fees for services. Many vendor websites were not much more than brokering centers for private tutors, including college students. Some offered video demos (e.g., YouTube), others an online space to display projects along with websites for other social exchanges. See for yourself at whoyouknow.org. What is being sold, to whom, who is enabling that, and why?
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Thanks for this report, Laura.
Florida’s State Constitution bans public funding of religious schools but reformers have found multiple ways to ignore the Constitution and the will of voters, expressed in 2012.
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Laura: If I have not said it before, I must say that I am always impressed by the homework you do. I want to be diligent, as you are, when and if I grow up.
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Amway has always had inroads with the evangelical community. Just look up on the Internet about the manipulation of hard working people who have been swindled by Amway. Many church going folks fall for these schemes. I think it is sinful how they made their money.
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They…Amway…not the church going folks.
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Omarosa was part of the problem and I believe she still is. Remember when she said she was keeping a list of those who opposed Trump? We are spending too much time watching her while Trump continues on his merry way. Just this week he removed regulations on coal.. just what we need acid rain to destroy the northeast. I fear she is just part of his neocon handlers plan.
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And … DUMP wants to DEFUND Public Libraries, too. SICK GOP: Greedy OPPRESSIVE Pr****.
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De Vos is an absolute nightmare for education.
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Betsy wants to do to education what her brothers-in-law and her husband have done to their company: Bypass the union and put the employees on “calibration”. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensation/pages/calibration-sessions.aspx
http://web.viapeople.com/viaPeople-blog/bid/86322/Calibrate-Don-t-Force-in-Employee-Performance-Management
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