{"id":25929,"date":"2017-01-19T10:17:11","date_gmt":"2017-01-19T18:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=25929"},"modified":"2017-01-19T10:17:11","modified_gmt":"2017-01-19T18:17:11","slug":"devos-at-a-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/19\/devos-at-a-loss\/","title":{"rendered":"DeVos at a Loss"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">In case you are not aware of this, Betsy DeVos Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christian billionaire, is the Theocon Fascist that Putin&#8217;s Perverted Puppet has appointed to destroy public education in the US.&#160; When she showed up for her hearings, she was quite ill prepared.<\/font><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"0119betsy_devos\" style=\"border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; float: none; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-left: auto; display: block; padding-right: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; margin-right: auto\" border=\"0\" alt=\"0119betsy_devos\" src=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/0119betsy_devos.jpg\" width=\"650\" height=\"366\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Betsy DeVos&#8217; confirmation hearing to become President-elect Donald Trump&#8217;s education secretary was originally scheduled for last Wednesday but ultimately postponed until late Tuesday afternoon. With an extra week to get ready, Senate Democrats came prepared\u2014and DeVos, oddly enough, did not.<\/p>\n<p>While Republicans on the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions lauded the billionaire philanthropist\u2014and prominent GOP donor\u2014for her commitment to expanding charter schools and voucher programs, committee Democrats barraged DeVos with specific, pointed questions about her attempts to privatize public education, even pleading with Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the HELP chairman, for the opportunity to ask more questions as the three-and-a-half-hour hearing boiled over.<\/p>\n<p>DeVos reaffirmed her support for an education system beyond a &quot;one size fits all&quot; approach that opened up choices\u2014&quot;whether magnet, virtual, charter, home, religious, or any combination thereof.&quot; But when pushed beyond her talking points, she was stiff and often thrown off her game:<\/p>\n<h6>&quot;If you were not a multibillionaire\u2026&quot;<\/h6>\n<p>Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) didn&#8217;t shy away from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2017\/01\/bernie-sanders-billionaire-education-secretary-betsy-devos\" target=\"_blank\">challenging DeVos<\/a> on her family&#8217;s large contributions to the Republican Party. &quot;Do you think that if you were not a multibillionaire, if your family had not made hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions, that you would be sitting here today?&quot; Sanders followed up by grilling DeVos on free college education and tax cuts on the richest Americans&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From &lt;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2017\/01\/betsy-devos-confirmation-hearing-bernie-sanders-al-franken-real-bad\" target=\"_blank\">Mother Jones<\/a>&gt;<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/cjPHrKqYEgk?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"640\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">To summarize, she ducked every one of Bernie&#8217;s questions in a way that made it clear that more welfare for billionaires should take precedence over any benefits for America&#8217;s students.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">In addition to Bernie, the article includes five more Senators who grilled DeVos, and it has a video for each.&#160; I recommend that you click through for the rest of this fine piece.&#160; Then&#8230;<\/font><\/p>\n<h1 align=\"center\"><font style=\"font-weight: bold\" color=\"#0000ff\">RESIST!!<\/font><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In case you are not aware of this, Betsy DeVos Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christian billionaire, is the Theocon Fascist that Putin&#8217;s Perverted Puppet has appointed to destroy public education in the US.&#160; When she showed up for her hearings, she was quite ill prepared. Betsy DeVos&#8217; confirmation hearing to become President-elect Donald Trump&#8217;s education secretary was <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/19\/devos-at-a-loss\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}